Photobooks Tips
Photo Books Tips & Tricks
- Book Monitor
- Two-Page Spread
- Adjusting and cropping your pictures
- Black & White and Sepia Filters, Fading
- Aligning Pictures
- Removing & Duplicating Frames/Pictures
- Designing Pages in Adobe Photoshop®
Book Monitor
Using the Book Monitor Feature, you can see issues that arise in your photo book in real-time. By default, the Book Monitor is set to on. If the Book Monitor has been turn off, go to the view menu and click “Show Book Monitor”.
A new bar will appear underneath the photo book pages scrollbar. I everything is 100% fine with your book, the bar will be blank. If however, there are issues with any page, color-coded boxes will appear for those pages with errors.
The color of the arrow indicates the most serious of the problems within the book. Placing the cursor over a coded-color error box will display a page’s problems, and allow you to go directly to the page to make changes.
Multiple problems on a single page with the same color-code will be presented by a single box of the pertinent color
Two-Page Spreads
Any of your picture can be used as a background for a two-page spread. Just drag a picture from the Image Browser to a page (but not onto the frame), and when asked “Would your picture to be used as a background for a single page, or across a two-page spread?” click the Two-Page Spread button.
Note: when using a landscape picture for a two-page spread background, it’s often best to use a portrait orientation book. Also, faces should be kept out of the gutter, as some of their fine details may be lost or distorted within the spine.
Adjusting & Cropping your pictures
Black & White and Sepia filters, fading
Aligning pictures
Removing & Duplicating frames/pictures
Designing pages in Adobe Photoshop®
If you plan to design some or all your pages in Adobe Photoshop®, There are a few things you need to know:
Bleed: when one or more sides of a printed image touch the edge of the paper, the use of bleed guarantees that the finish (cropped) page will look neat and precise. The page bleed allowance should be 1/8 inch at all four sides of the page. The bleed are (i.e. beyond the crop marks) will be trimmed off. If you use a background color or image, it should cover the entire page including the bleed area. For example, if your printed page is 8.5 inch wide, your page design should be 8.75 inch wide with the bleed (1/8″ + 8.5″ + 1/8″).When you move an image in the page layout, the trim line, coloured in red, and the grid will show up and it allows you to place the image away from the trim line.
Two-Page Spread: this is a page design that spans both right and left-hand pages. The pages are centered at the gutter where they are bound into the spine. Approximately 1/4″ of the spread will be bound into (and thus hidden within) the spine. This, in of itself, is not a problem, but it does require a bit of special attention when using an external tool, such as Adobe Photoshop® to create page design.
- Be sure to leave bleed at all sides. The Treasure-Book My Photo Books software will automatically adjust any background used as if it has bleed designed into it.
- Keep important design details at least 1/8″ form all sides of the page (1/4″ is even better) so that unwelcome trimming does not occur.
- Keep important design details an extra 1/4″ away form the center binding (this is in addition to the bleed you leave on all 4 sides of the page). This is an issue specifically for single page designs.
- The software will adjust the spread pages for the 1/4″ lost within the spine. To this end, the spread should be designed to be 1/4″ smaller than the size that it would be if you were to include the gutter. Also, Keep in mind that although page spreads are well suited for panoramic pictures backgrounds, fine details may be partially obscure within the binding.
