Love in pictures

Look at that! It's our wedding album (and our honeymoon album)! It's only been what... 10 months and a bit since we got married. :-) I guess you could say I've done a thorough job at procrastinating on this! But it was a daunting task: some 2,000 pictures from the wedding alone (collected from different people) to weed through and then adjust them for print. And we had over 1,000 pictures from our honeymoon to go through a similar process. I'm getting exhausted just thinking about it!

But then Blurb announced that now you can make your book document and upload it to them as a PDF (which is what I wanted - total control, unlike using their templates) and I realised that I could download a trial version of InDesign, valid for 30 days. That was the kick in the backside I needed, so for a good chunk of July that's what I was busying myself with.

The front cover of the wedding album is my bouquet and our rings on a rock during our 'official photo shoot'. The back cover is one I took in the hotel room the morning after the wedding, again the bouquet, this time with the gifts we gave each other. On the honeymoon cover is a composite image of pictures of the baths of Caracalla. One of our favourite places in Rome. Tony suggested that picture, and I daresay it was a very good suggestion.

It took maaaaany hours of sorting and adjusting and moving things around and stuff. But I am glad I put in the hours. It is our wedding album, after all! And I am really, really pleased with the result. Blurb recommend using images in CMYK but I have no program available that can convert from RGB, so I was a bit unsure how it would turn out. It was fine, can't really tell any difference between what I saw on my monitor and the printed images.

But if you want to print pictures in a book through Blurb, or similar, I recommend taking the time to lighten your images. Not a lot, just enough that they look a little bit too light on your monitor. Because colour will inevitably print darker than it looks on a monitor where it is rendered with light. But there is no light in ink. ;-)

So yes, Blurb more than lived up to my expectations. Both the actual result but also the fairly quick turnaround time - I got the books in less than 2 weeks, I thought I'd have to wait a lot longer than that. Plus the price is reasonable too, as is the shipping, unlike certain other similar services.