How to Choose a Printing Service for Your Digital Photo Book

There are a course in miracles bookstore that offer custom photo book creation and printing. Photo book styles, sizes and creative options can vary so it is wise to look at several photo services before you design your book.

Begin by looking at reviews. You’ll want a printer that produces books with true-to-life color, that uses sturdy, high quality paper and offers the book size and cover style you’re looking for. Price counts too, and you can often get some terrific photo book deals by using coupon or discount codes.

Also, look at whether the photo book creation process is simple and straightforward and check out the average turnaround time. Are you planning to just upload your images and create the photo book with the company’s templates, styles and colors or are you interested in designing your photo book with your imaging software and then upload completed pages?

Photo Book Sizes
Quite often services will feature several sizes like 8.5×11 landscape or portrait, 12×12 scrapbook size or smaller flip or brag books. Some feature even bigger sizes. A few like Viovio produce books in a big array of sizes such as tabloid. If you are a scrapbooker wanting to make a traditional square book, be sure to check the printer specs carefully, because some so-called 8×8 or 12×12 books actually have finished sizes with dimensions that are slightly off from the above and you don’t want something important to get cropped.

Cover Choices
Again, some companies offer a wide a variety of cover options including leather, linen, velvet, dust-jacket, spiral-bound, and window cut-out, others just offer hardcover (known as casewrapped) with a photo printed on the front and back cover and softcover (sometimes called perfect bound).

Customizing Your Photo book in Scrapbooking Software vs Using Automatic Layouts
You can create your own photo book pages in your own software such as Photoshop Elements, My Memories Suite or Paint Shop Pro or even Adobe InDesign. This provides full control for layout, background, font styles, photo and text positioning etc. Keep in mind that in order to create your book you will need to save your pages as JPG or PDF format and then upload them to the photo site and insert them as pages. It’s easier to do with some services more so than others, so if you do your own pages be sure to review the photo printer’s specs page to confirm page sizes, bleeding and crops.

If you are not the creative type or have limited time, the majority of printing services feature a range of layouts, fonts, backgrounds and colors to customize your book.

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