My first Blurb book

Thanks - I'm looking forward to seeing the quality of the soft cover version. Should receive that next week.

Wow congrats on this book. Looks great.

Did you receive your soft cover book yet? How did it compare with the hard cover book? My first Blurb book came in last week, hard cover of course and the quality was excellent. But I am very interested on your thoughts on the soft bound book.

Again, excellent book you produced!

FuryMe wrote in post #4583285
Did you receive your soft cover book yet? How did it compare with the hard cover book? My first Blurb book came in last week, hard cover of course and the quality was excellent. But I am very interested on your thoughts on the soft bound book.

Again, excellent book you produced!

Yes I did, and I already gave them all away to people as Christmas gifts. The quality of the soft cover is fine, but because I only had about 35 pages, it wasn't nearly as substantial as the hardcover. No fault of Blurb, but had I known it would have such a small feel, I'd probably have just gotten everyone hard covers. I guess it was just a little underwhelming after having seen the hardcover first. Maybe with more pages it wouldn't have seemed like that - but I don't know how some people do those 100+ page books, it took me a couple of weeks just to get 35 pages done!

It looks really great, Liz. I'm going to consider this for when I return from the Farne Islands in the Summer.

gymell wrote in post #4583311
No fault of Blurb, but had I known it would have such a small feel, I'd probably have just gotten everyone hard covers. I guess it was just a little underwhelming after having seen the hardcover first.

So it has a little bit of a glossy magazine feel to it? The hard cover does add a lot of bulk even to a 30 page book.

Another question, do you use Photoshop Elements more then Paintshop Pro? I love Paintshop Pro, but for the price I would be willing to give Elements a try.

Anke wrote in post #4583572
It looks really great, Liz. I'm going to consider this for when I return from the Farne Islands in the Summer.

Thanks - it made a great gift and a really good way to share photos with people. Everyone who saw it was really impressed, even with such a small book. I had thought of doing a calendar, which I've done before, but that only lasts a year and doesn't include as many photos or text.

FuryMe wrote in post #4583636
So it has a little bit of a glossy magazine feel to it? The hard cover does add a lot of bulk even to a 30 page book.

Another question, do you use Photoshop Elements more then Paintshop Pro? I love Paintshop Pro, but for the price I would be willing to give Elements a try.

The soft cover has more weight to it than a magazine. But definitely not as substantial as the hard cover.

I only recently got Photoshop, and the only thing I've used it for is to use the Genuine Fractals plugin to upsize some photos for the book. I wanted all of the photos to be the exact resolution recommended for each page layout I selected, at 300 dpi. One of the experiments I tried was doing a centerfold spread across two pages, but even the 1D Mark III images didn't have a large enough resolution at 300 dpi for that. The GF plugin is not compatible with Paintshop Pro because it's based on the Photoshop 7 Plugin SDK, but Paintshop Pro only supports plugins from version 5 or earlier (which covers most of them like NeatImage, FocalBlade, etc.) The pro photographer who lead the eagle trip recommended Genuine Fractals and he uses that to make huge poster-sized prints. It worked great for the book and at some point I'll try a huge print myself. I also want to try Blurb's large format landscape size book (13x11) so I would definitely need to upsize for that as well.