Putting Your Custom Templates Into Booksmart
February 5, 2008Many 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!
[...] February 5, 2008: Putting Your Custom Templates Into Booksmart [...]
Thank you! All of your Blurb tutorial have helped a lot!
Yes, thank you! I was just wondering about this last night and put it off until tonight! Yay, synchronicity!
Hi Robin,
I’m new to blurb books and somehow l came across your blog,which is fantastic. LOVE!! your Fiji album your photos look amazing. My question is, l have downloaded your page templates but for some reason when l open them in Adobe photoshop 5, l only see a black canvas, no trim lines nothing. Unfortunatley l’m also very new to photoshop so l tried to follow your how to creat custom templates but it’s just not working for me.
Would love any help you can spare.
Thanks
Bula Daniela!
I don’t have Photoshop 5 but it sounds like you may need to turn the view guides on. I remember hearing about someone else talking about that on a different site. Not sure if that is much help or not.
Moce,
Robin
Robin, once again THANKS for everything you’ve done to get many of us creating custom pages!
I got my first book back, you can find some photos of it here (click on Africa 2007):
http://www.cherryfieldphotography.com/books/
There are also some examples of things I did when creating pages and how to take advantage of clipping masks. Hopefully these will help others as much as your pages helped me.
-Wren
Dear Robin,
I was finally successful in finding your templates for 8×10 Blurb books and was able to custom design the cover following your instructions. I am a 100% novice with design software. But between the InDesign tutorial videos and your instructions, I was able to create the front and back cover fairly easily. I truly appreciate the time and effort that you have taken to help the rest of us!
Monique
Thank you so much for doing these. I would have been lost without all the information. Being able to find step by step instructions and custom templates is what made my final decision to go with Blurb.
Hello Robin,
I’m in a situation. Been working on my wedding album since December. Well I followed blurbs guidelines of making my images in photoshop at 9.61x 8.24. As I was placing my images into booksmart it said my images were low resolution. Looks like I failed to up my resolution to 300 and everything is at 72dpi. Any suggestions on how to fix this. I’m new at photoshop.
Thank you,
Oh one more thing I have tried opening the images and went to resize and updated it to 300dpi but when I transfer it to booksmart it still says low resolution.
THANK YOU! I got married on Feb 23rd and I plan on making my own wedding book since we have all of the full size files from my photographer. I didn’t want to use the standard “plug & play” options, so your site is exactly what I need. I can’t wait to get started with your templates. I’ll be sure to share the results once I’m done (which will likely be summer when I get some time off!)
First of all, THANK YOU for your generosity with all your great info—this will make my project so much easier.
I do have a question: Do you know what the measurements are for the flap areas in an 8×10 landscape cover? And I’m guessing that I just have to go with their spine (vs using my own image for that area?)
Thank you kindly,
Ellen
Ah, I figured it out— you have to ‘hover’ above the image area on the dust cover flap and it’ll give you the measurements.
Well, was looking for a online printing company. This tutorial made all the difference. Thanks alot. 3 day’s to go till book delivary….
I can’t wait to see your tutorial outcome.
Greetings from the Netherlands
Hi Robin,
My blurb book arrived, a 7×7 40 pages book, your tips about crop spread worked great.
I got some quality issues. My book was totally made in Adobe InDesign CS3 and direct exported to JPG. Some pages were horrible printed, probabily some color issues. I´m really sure it isn´t about resolution, because all my source pictures were at least 200dpi and some of them (200dpi) were better then others at 300 dpi (over).
Was your book a 7×7? Have any clues?
I’m publishing a 13 x 11 book on Blurb and I want to include page numbers. The new Blurb templates that have page numbers leaves a lot of space around and makes the image smaller than I would like. What’s the easiest way to have page numbers embeded in the jpeg file? I’ve tried to add a layer, but size seems to change from file to file. Please help.
I’m working with Photoshop and have approximately 150 pages.
Nice tutorials – the upshot of these guides is that you’re basically using an image/layout editor to create complete page pictures that you then drop into blank pages in Booksmart?
The only possible issue I see is with text – using this method your text will be output at 300dpi. Typically text that is output directly from say InDesign or Quark Xpress is usually 1200dpi – this is why you use a layout editor or illustrator over say photoshop.
So I’ve not used Booksmart, but I’m guessing that you’d get better quality text actually typing the text in, particularly large passages of small type text. I’m looking for a way to do custom layouts, but I need best quality text output.
Hi Robin,
Thanks for all the info here. A quick question: I am creating my own pages in photoshop, but when I place text on these pages, and then import them into Booksmart, the text is not very smooth (i.e. the edges of it have blurry pixels). When I open the photoshop-created jpgs in my picture viewer, the text is very crisp, as it appears in Photoshop. However, when imported into Blurb it is not.
(btw, the text is a chapter title, that I want to drop a shadow on, so the solution isn’t really to just add the text over the jpg in booksmart, which I would otherwise be completely happy to do). Thanks for any help you can offer..
Hello Robin,
thanks for all the great info & tuto’s
I do have one question,
when I finished my picture in photoshop (2 pages in 1 image) and I want to import that in booksmart, how do I have to do that, I understand booksmart pretty good but how can I make 2 pages filled with 1 same image?
greets,
Jarno
OK .. I just found it
ur just to good !!
Thanks for all of your help! Do you know if there is anyway to export out of Booksmart and into InDesign (without the watermarks)? I would like to standardize on InDesign going forward.
Robin,
Thank you so much! These tutorials are awesome and have helped me create my own books in a much shorter time than I thought possible! I did have one question – I used Indesign templates to create my pages, and so saved them as .jpg files using the export option. (I’m assuming this is correct). The only problem is some of them have black boxes over some of the pictures, and I’m not quite sure why. Any suggestions?! Thanks so much!