Cropping is your friend

The After:

The Before:

You would never know…

Sometimes you don’t even know what you have

While visiting a traditional Fijian village on our honeymoon I took some pictures of a boy playing with a rugby ball. Children aren’t allowed to play inside the village grounds unless it is rugby, the nation’s favorite sport. So I was taking pictures of the boy because he was bending the rules by playing with the ball by himself.

I took some pictures and forgot about them. When I came back home I was pleasantly surprised to find this picture. I love that you can clearly see the McDonalds symbol on the ball. Even on a very remote island in Fiji there are McDonalds toys!

Let me know what you think.  Have you ever taken a great photo but didn’t know it?

Putting Your Custom Templates Into Booksmart

This post along with other Blurb book tips and tutorials can be found in the “Want to Make a Blurb Book?” link.

Many of you have asked me about how to actually put their finished templates into Blurb’s Booksmart software. So here it goes:

Step 1.) Make sure you have all of your pages saved as high resolution jpegs at 300dpi (dots per inch). If you have everything still saved as a spread (two pages side by side) you’ll have to crop them in into two pages see my post about creating actions to do this fast and efficiently. To make things faster later title your pages by their page number. Remember to include zeros in front of the page number, ie 001, so that when you sort the pages by their titles everything is in the right order.

 

Step 2.) Open up Booksmart and pick the size book you want to make. Leave the title and author blank if you’ve created your own cover with that information on it. Next choose photobook, the location of your page jpegs, and your theme. Or you can just click the wing it button.

 

Step 3.) For my book I deleted the first couple copyright and title pages because I wanted to open the book up to a picture. To use your custom pages you need to make sure you use the full bleed picture option (the completely gray box). If you created all the pages yourself you’ll need to select that template for each page. But you don’t have to create each page yourself. You can just create a few custom pages and use the provided templates for the rest. In this example I’m using all custom pages so I need to delete every page that isn’t completely gray and add a lot of the solid gray pages. To do this quickly select a bunch of the completely gray pages by holding down the Shift key while you select and then simply copy and paste.

 

Step 4.) Next you need to put your pages in the templates. If you don’t have the pictures already imported into Booksmart do so by clicking the Get Photos button. Then click on the sort by drop down list and sort the pictures by their title. That is why numbering the pages is so important. Finally, select the first page of your layout and click the Autoflow button. All of your pages should be put in order but you should go through and check the order and that you had enough pages for it to fill (otherwise your book with be shorter than you’d like).

 

Also, if you want to make your own custom covers you can add your own typeface and put it where ever you want. Note: the covers are different sizes than the inside pages. For those sizes click here. That is how I did my cover for those of you who were wondering. You need to select the cover template with the solid gray front and back and just leave the text boxes (the thin gray box) blank.

 

Let me know if you have any questions or if this helped you!