iPhoto - publishing extras you've used?

I've been secretly assembling a photo album of our summer's vacation as a surprise present for my wife, using the "Books" feature within iPhoto.

I know I should have asked before I leaped, but figured that its not too late for others to consider using iPhoto to quickly make up a gift for a friend/familymember or a 2007 calendar, etc, for anyone looking for ideas.


Personally, I was favorably impressed with the ease of use of the drag-n-drop into the iPhoto's "book" template, and while there were a couple of instances where I didn't like the limitations on creative control imposed by the tempates, overall, I think iteh project is going to turn out pretty well. FWIW, I chose the hardbound 8.5 x 11 and at ("only") 75 pages, it came out to around $90 after shipping.

I know cost is a factor, but I'm mostly interested in the quality of the finished product and how good other people's experiences have been. The real reason I'm asking this question is essentially: "Do I need to open the box to do a final Quality Control check before I give it to her?"


Survey Sez:

a) Exceeded my expectations
b) Didn't meet my expectations, but was still good
c) Bad - burn them at the Stake!
d) Have found a better service (Specify)
e) Haven't tried

-hh

Applespider said:

I would do a check before you hand it over. There have been instances where there have been pics accidentally misprinted reported although mine have always been fine. If you're using iPhoto 6, you'll find that the print quality should have been updated. If you were on 5, there's a clever little hidden preference file that you should update before you order so that a higher res file is generated.

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Well, too late for this go-around, but I am still using 5 ... do you recall where this preferences file is?


-hh

Applespider said:

I suspect you'll be OK on the large hardcover. It was the mediums that people were complaining about more. If you google for iPhoto and Prefsetter, you'll probably find a few posts explaining more about how to do it.

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An update:

First, I found Prefsetter and some background info on it. If I read it correctly, it sounds like the question of 150dpi vs 300dpi is moot once you move up to iPhoto v6, correct? Ditto if one upgrades to Aperature.

Second, I got a chance this morning to open the box to quickly proof it this morning (will have to wrap it tomorrow, etc). My overall impression was "good, not awesome".


As for my reasons why I gave them only a "B", I'd put them down as:

- opinion bias. It irritates me to no end to so cavalierly "throw away" resolution, and in this case I knew about the 150dpi vs 300dpi issue before I looked at the finished product.

- page weight/gloss. The pages were essentially "normal magazine" grade, which is a notch down from National Geographic. I did expect a heavier grade paper, and one with more gloss, so I'd have to consider the product here to be a moderate "lightweight". I'm not going to demand that Apple provide a choice of weights, but for the size & cost of the Large Hardback, I did honestly expect slightly better.

- WYSIWYG. Apple gets good marks for not applying any obvious post-processing on my images ... which revealed that I should have spent some more of my own time on image processing to sharpen, saturate, and other forms of generic 'improvement' before hitting the buy button. This is something for me to fix, not Apple, but did affect my overall conclusion as to how in the end analysis, the project came out.

- Template limitations (iPhoto5). I've mentioned that there had been a couple of instances where I was unsatisfied with the limitations of the templates, so I'm not surprised that I self-validated my negative reaction in the final product. I don't know if iPhoto6 has more template choices or not, but I didn't particularly care for being cornered at times by the sometimes very narrow choices in v5.


My general feedback is:

Physical: B-. for a ~75 page large hardbound that set me back roughly $100, I really did expect a higher grade of paper.


Templates: C-. A great idea and generally well executed, but at times very frustrating to exercise creative control. For example, for the layout of 3 photos on one page, while its good in adjusting between horizontal & vertical, a frustrating instance was where I couldn't have a large vertical that did not have the template's artificial creases (to simulate that it had been folded up) imposed on the image.

IMO, special effects such as this are not only a matter of personal taste, but are also trendy fads that can go stale very fast. My general beef here is that one's ability to get rid of this sort of "cute" stuff if you don't want it is very limited at times due to the lack of hidden advanced features. It also was a bit frustrating in that the template could *sometimes* be used to recompose an image without dropping back into the iPhoto database to crop it, but this performance was irregular, just as it also was possible to sometimes override the template through the workflow you used to drop images into the template & move them around. The good news is that there are a few more options available than is immediately obvious, but the way to get to them is ugly and unpredicable.


Cropped images: A. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the crops of small birds came out (degree of effective enlargement), although this has to be tempered a little bit with the book's 150dpi resolution - - it is possible that if the book had been done at 300dpi that these strong crops would have manifested some amount of resolution weakness.


Cost: B. I'll live with it, but it is high enough that publishing photo albums in this fashion isn't going to be a casual enterprise.


My wishlist of things that's not obvious from the above is that a neat idea and nice touch could be to have a "DVD Pocket" page included in the templates so that the buyer could later insert their own iMovie creation inside the Album.


I think my overall conclusion is that my wife will be thrilled, but I know that I could have done better and that Apple could have done better too.


-hh

Gift Report

The "gift report" is that my wife likes the book & familymembers were really impressed with its quality.

qua said:

...I give the result a 95 out of 100.
I knew in advance to sharpen to the edge of tolerable...The only thing I didn't get quite right on was saturation. I advanced saturation in Photoshop to my own visual limit. That isn't quite enough. I advise advancing saturation about 10% beyond what you are looking for.

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I do know (more so in hindsight now) that part of my 'dislike' for my results was that I didn't spend a lot of time in post-processing and should have, mostly in the two items that Qua hits above (sharpness & saturation). Apple did not do any second-guessing postprocessing, which is a good thing.

I also added (in Photoshop) thin white background strips on top/side of images mounted two per page to dis-attach them.

Click to expand...

Huh? Can you please explain and/or illustrate this? TIA,


-hh