Happy Fourth of July, everyone! I hope you are enjoying spending time with your family and honoring those who keep our country safe for us. We celebrated a little early, watching fireworks with my in-laws last night, and now I'm up early with the baby while everyone is sleeping in a bit. Except I really shouldn't be call him him "the baby" seeing as he's started walking in the past few days. He takes these huge, drunken sailor steps with his arms help up high and a huge-mongous grin on his face. And my camera battery is...are you ready for this?...DEAD. And I'm at my in-laws and my charger is at home. So, everyone, learn from my mistakes. Keep your charger with you at all times! :)
Anyway, back to the matter at hand. I recently completed an album of our trip to Disneyland a few months ago. I decided to make it digitally because I wanted to make a copy for myself and a copy for my mother-in-law, who came with us, and I had no interest in physically putting together duplicate albums (I did that once for me and my mom for another trip, and it was a lot of work!). So I decided to make digital pages and have them printed as a photo book, which would make the duplication super simple. The hardest part is deciding BEFORE YOU BEGIN where you'll have your book printed, because different printers often use slightly different sizes of paper. I'm cheap, so I started out at artscow.com, because I'd heard they have great prices. And they do, but they only print square sizes, and I just prefer traditional book sizes when I design (I like a page that's longer on one side than the other. I think it keeps things interesting). Next I tried Sam's Club, because their books are very nicely priced as well. But ! ran into bleed problems.
***A full bleed page means your "photo" (or digital layout) will take up the entire page, with no white showing around the edges. Most photo book printers expect you to drop pictures into their templates, a couple pictures to a page. But since I had predesigned my pages in Photoshop Elements and saved each layout as a jpg, I chose the one-photo, full bleed option for each page of my photobook. Each large, full-bleed photo was actually an entire layout.***
The problem is that every printer needs to have a little wiggle room with full bleed--which basically means they print your picture a little large to ensure there's no white border around it on the actual page, and then they trim off that extra around the side. This means when you are making digital pages that will be printed you have to be very careful not to put important stuff, like text or people's faces, near the edges of your pages (including that center edge if you are designing a two-page spread). When I uploaded my layouts at Sam's Club, the example showed an entire half inch of my layout getting cut off all around the edge. I'd designed it with some wiggle room, but I didn't expect to lose that much of the layout. I just really wasn't sure what the final product was going to look like.
So I went back to Shutterfly, which I had originally ruled out because of price (two 30 page books plus shipping was going to end up at nearly $90, which was too steep for me). But Shutterfly knows people are using their service to print digital pages, and so they have a great set of instructions telling you how to get the very best results. They tell you exactly how much will get cut off the edge for bleed, and how to turn off their auto-color correct, etc. As my husband pointed out, sometimes the extra money is worth it if you know you'll be getting a better product. I don't think that Shuttefly is a better printer, in general, than all the other book printers out there - but I really appreciated the information that was specific to my situation.
Sorry, I'm getting long-winded again. Suffice to say, I uploaded my book, and they were having a special, 30% off a second book. And I googled for coupon codes and found one for free shipping, one for 20% off your order, and one for $5 off. And Shutterfly accepted them all! So I ended up with two gorgeous books for $52! I'd have easily spent more than that had I made them both in paper and purchased albums. Plus, I used a pretty limited array of digital supplies (some free fonts, a nice flourish from Anna Aspnes, a set of stitching holes from Katie Pertiet, a circle brush by J Crowley that I used to make a Mickey outline, and about five papers that I used over and over and recolored when necessary - for fifteen double page spreads!) Can you tell I'm excited about it? I gave my mother-in-law her copy two days ago and she hasn't stopped gushing about it yet. I really love her.
So here you have it: my favorite pages from my Disney album. You can click on each layout to open it larger in it's own window. I hope you like it, and thanks so much for all your comments this week - I've had a blast! I'll see you in the gallery!
