Want to Make a Blurb Book?

I’ve organized all the posts I’ve made regarding Blurb books and how to make custom layouts for them. This way they can be in a chronological/logical order. As I add posts regarding Blurb books I will update and link them to here so keep checking back.

 

 

 

First, download the free templates for the size book you are looking to make. I’ve created both Photoshop and InDesign files for each book.

Here you can learn how to use the free templates I’ve provided.

If you want to learn how I created these templates or create your own in Photoshop click here.

 

December 31, 2007: See some pictures of how my Blurb book turned out

January 12, 2008: Learn how to put a picture across the gutter of a spread

January 17, 2008: Creating Photoshop Actions

February 5, 2008: Putting Your Custom Templates Into Booksmart

 

Coming Soon

• Quick tips on how to make a unique book
• A review of my Blurb book (and it’s two replacements)
• Uncommon things to add to your book

How to Use the Free Blurb Templates

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

Here’s a quick guide on how to use the free Blurb templates I’ve provided.

 

After you’ve downloaded and unzipped the templates you should have a .tiff file and an .inx file. If you are using Photoshop open the .tiff file. If you are using InDesign open the .inx file (InDesign XML Interchange Document). Here’s what you should see:

 

 

Around each page and in the center there are trim guides and safety guides. Anything outside the trim guide will be cut. In the center, anything in the trim guide will be used for binding the book so it won’t be seen. The safety guides are in case more is trimmed than intended (this is fairly common in any bookmaking process). No wording or important parts of a picture should be in this area. Be careful to not have the tops of heads, hands, or feet in this area. The example below is shown in InDesign but the guides are in the same place as Photoshop.

There are also guides in the center of each page to help align things up.

 

 

When you are adding pictures to the templates that you want to bleed to the edges of the page make sure that the photo goes all the way to the edges of the page. Don’t leave any pictures at the edge of the trim guide.

 

 

For text make sure that you have a margin starting from the inside of the safety guide. This also applies to photos or graphics that you don’t want to bleed to the edge.

 

 

You can easily change the background color of the template in Photoshop using the paint bucket tool. Pick the color you want by double clicking on the top of the two colored squares in your tools palette. Next, make sure you are in your Background Layer (Window>Layers). Then click on the paint bucket tool and click on the background of the template.

 

 

In InDesign you need to create a background using the rectangular tool. First, pick your color by double clicking on the top of the two colored squares in your tools palette. Here I picked a blue color. Next, select your rectangular tool button and create a rectangle over the page/spread. It is good practice to extend your background color a short distance outside your page.

 

 

When creating layouts in the templates line pictures up using uniform margins between the pictures. Do not line pictures up using uniform margins to the edge of the page. This is because you don’t really know where exactly the page will be cut so you have no way of knowing how much of that margin will be left in the final product. The top of the page may have been cropped off more than the bottom of the page. This works for pictures of any shape or size. Just keep the margin uniform. Below is an exaggerated example so you can see the difference.

Here’s how you should line up the pictures.

The layout would ideally print like this if everything was trimmed evenly.

But even if the top and bottom are trimmed more than the edge the layout still looks good.

If you had lined up each picture in the center of that quadrant of the page and the trim and safety areas were trimmed your pictures would no longer be in the center of the quadrant.

 

 

Finally, if you want a centered layout make sure everything is centered off of the center guides. Similar to the example above do not use the edge guides if you want something to be centered. Even if you have uniform margins between the pictures you still need to make sure you have the overall layout centered. If, for example, the top of the page was trimmed more than the rest of the page your layout would be higher than the center of the page.

 

This should get you started with your new templates.

Let me know if you have any questions or if this tutorial was helpful.

Free Blurb Templates

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

With all the interest in people wanting to learn how to create their own templates for Blurb books I’ve decided to make some templates available for download. I’ve created templates in Photoshop and InDesign for all the different sizes of books available through Blurb.

Below are downloadable zip files each containing both a Photoshop and InDesign template.

Download the 7×7″ book templates

Download the 8×10″ (portrait) book templates

Download the 10×8″ (landscape) book templates

Download the 13×11″ book templates

The Photoshop templates are saved as .tiff files and the InDesign files were exported as .inx files (InDesign XML Interchange Documents) so everyone should be able to open them not matter what version of Photoshop or InDesign they have.

Leave a comment if you are having trouble opening the files or if you like these templates.

I will have a tutorial on how to use these templates tomorrow in case you’re lost.

Update 1/22/08: Sorry, I’ve re-zipped the files because I forgot to put the center guides on the InDesign files. Just download the current version to get the new files if need be.

Update 1/26/08: The 8×10 and 10×8 horizontal center guide weren’t exactly on center. Download the current version or you can center the guides yourself.

Creating Photoshop Actions

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

So I’ve showed you how to create your own album templates and how to put a picture across the gutter of a page, but after you’ve created your spreads you’ll need to crop them into two separate pages. This is because for online albums like Blurb you need to upload each page separately. The quickest, easiest way to turn your spreads into two different pages is to create some Photoshop actions. Actions are very simple to make and use plus they can save you tons of time.

 

1.) First open up one of your spreads. Then open the actions palette (Widow>Actions).

 

2.) Second, make a new action by clicking on the button that looks like a Post-It note (second from the right). In the window that pops up give the action a name and designate a function key. The function key will serve as a shortcut to playing your action in the future. For this example I’m naming the action “Left Page Crop.” Then click Record.

 

3.) Now you just do whatever you want to be recorded as your action. To a spread into two pages I created two different actions. For the first action, used to create the left page, I just selected the crop tool from the tool palette and cropped the spread to be just the left page of the spread. Remember the very center guide designates the page separation so this is where you should crop it to.

 

4.) To finish the action press the stop button (the square button in the bottom left). You should have only the left side page showing. Now save the page as the page number not the original file name using Save As (Shift+Ctrl+S). Save the page as a jpeg at the highest quality possible.

 

5.) Next, you need to create a second action to make the right side page. Repeat steps 2 & 3 naming the action “Right Page Crop.” While recording this action you need to do one more step. In the history palette (Widow>History) click on the previous step (in the picture below this is Open), undoing the left side crop. Then re-crop the spread to be the right page.

 

6.) Finish off the right side page by stopping the action and saving the file as the page number. And your finished!

 

You should have two .jpeg files now one for each page.

 

To use these actions now all you need to do is:

1. Open the next layout you’ve created
2. Hit the function key for the Left Page Crop
3. Save the left page to a new name
4. Hit the Right Page Crop function key
5. Save the right page

Once you get a rhythm going you’ll fly through all those spreads!

Math can be Beautiful

I’ve always had a thing for fractals. They are advanced mathematics but yet can be very artistic. A marriage of both the right and the left brain. The Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest Winners were recently announced and I loved the variety of fractals. Here are some of my favorites:

(Graphics courtesy of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest Website)

Aren’t they great! I wish I could do that.

I Wish I Was Here

Not staring out the window at the snow.

This photo was taken with our point and shoot Canon Power Shot SD800 IS in the matching underwater case (Canon WP-DC9). I haven’t Photoshopped it at all. We were kayaking with some friends down the Wisconsin River south of Wisconsin Dells when I caught this shot. I love the reflection of the clouds and my new kayak!

Putting a Photo Across the Gutter of a Spread

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

 

Putting a photo across the gutter of a book so that none of the picture is lost is one of the most common questions in the Blurb forums. Many people call this a two page photo spread but the spread could have more than one photo so I try not to call it that. I have had a bunch of people ask me how I did it so I created a quick easy guide with only 6 steps.

Let me know if this tutorial is helpful or if you have any questions.

 

1.) Open up your album template file (to learn how to do this see this post) and pick out the picture you want to put in the spread.

 

2.) Size your photo to the size you want it to be. To do this right click in blue bar at the top of the photo and select Image Size. Make sure that you have the resolution set to 300 dpi (pixels/inch), the same resolution of the template you made earlier. Note that the overall length of the photo will be increased after adjusting for the gutter. So if you want the photo to bleed (go all the way to the edge) to both the left and the right side of the spread but don’t want to loose any of the photo use this equation (yes, there’s an equation I’m an engineer after all):

Total width of the spread – Half the width of the gutter = Width you should size the photo to

For a 13×11″ Blurb book (the example I used to show you how to make an album template) you would need to size the photo to 24.95″ wide (25.2″ – 0.25″ = 24.95″).

 

3.) Now put the photo you just resized into you template. To do this simply click on your move/arrow tool (in the top right corner of your tools palette) and drag and drop the photo into your template. Using the same move tool place the photo where you would want it on one of the pages. For this tutorial I’m going to place the photo on the left page and adjust the part of the photo on the right.

Drag the photo all the way to the left, leaving empty space on the right side of the page. In the template you made earlier the right side of the photo should line up with the safety guide on the right.

 

4.) Next, select the rectangular marquee tool (the dashed square button in the top left corner of your tools palette) and select all of the photo from the far left guide in the center to the far right side of the photo.

Make sure you select from the far left guide in the center all the way to the right side of the photo.

 

5.) After you’ve made the selection copy and paste the selected part as another layer. Simply hit Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to do this. The copied part of the picture should appear as another layer on top of your original picture. The copied section should appear right over the top of the original photo so you won’t be able to see it until you move it.

 

6.) Finally, simply move the new photo layer over to the far right side of the page. The left edge of the new layer should line up with the center guide (two guides over from you copied it from). And that’s it. You’re finished!

I darkened the original picture so you can see where the copied part of the picture should be.

Here is what the final product should look like. I removed the guides (View>Clear Guides) so that you can see the picture better. Be careful if you decide to clear the guides too because there is not “Redo Guides” option. You’ll have to undo it by either going to Edit>Undo or by clicking on the option above the clear guides step in the History palette.

Here you can see how part of the right side is repeated. Don’t worry this repeated part will not show up in the book because it will be used for the binding.

 

Here’s how the actual book turned out.

 

Here are some other spreads I used this technique on:

 

You can also do this for layouts that have more than one photo. You can see how in both of these layouts that a tree extends from one page to the next and everything lines up perfectly.

 

Note: After you’re done with your layouts crop the spread in half along the center guide. To do this use the crop tool (in the tool palette or simply press C). Save the files as jpegs at the highest resolution possible numbering the files with the corresponding page numbers. Don’t worry the guides won’t appear in the jpegs. Lastly, upload to whichever site you are using to make your book. You should have each page as a separate jpeg.



Side Note: A fast easy way to crop the spreads into two separate pages is to create an action. Watch for a post about creating an action soon.

Wedding Layouts – The Art Session

These are the layouts I created for our wedding album for the wedding party and bride and groom outdoor portraits. They’re the fun ones. Libby, our photographer, called these shots our art session and she shot some really unique photos during this part of the day. But I have to say our end of the night session was pretty artsy too.

Hopefully, you are all enjoying the layouts I created for our wedding album. I’m putting them on here for three main reasons. One, when I was trying to find layout ideas for our album I had a hard time finding stuff that didn’t look like a 3rd grader could do it. Two, I’m trying to show how Photoshop can be affectively used in an album. Just because you can add a diagonal rainbow gradient overlay doesn’t mean you should. And third, I want to show off my hard work. : )

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Doesn’t it make me look hot?!

 

This is one of my favorite spreads. I love the relaxed smirks on the guys faces and the cool angle.

 

No one was allowed to smile…yes I was one of the those brides.

 

Our assasination shot.

 

This was my favorite picture so I didn’t want to distract from it by putting a different picture next to it.

 

This page is hilarious! Scroll down to see why.

 

This is another one of my favorite spreads because of the cut out I did. We are surprised here because Libby, our photographer, was pulling out an antique chair she had brought all the way from Milwaukee so we could take pictures in front of the old one room school house.

 

I got him this collapsible silk top hat for Christmas last year (he has a small top hat collection). It’s the Cadillac of top hats and made for some great pictures. Katie, Libby’s assistant, had to run past the school and around to the back of the church to get the top hat out of his truck for these pictures.

 

Our “mad” shot. The smaller pictures are us trying to both look mad.

 

This is my husband’s favorite shot of me from the wedding.

 

Don’t be afraid to use color and black and white shots on the same page.

 

We secretly took a few dance lessons so we wanted to practice before heading up to the reception.

 

Some of the Photoshopping for these pages

We had this great shot of the wedding party where everyone but Laura looked happy, she looked like she had started the drinking a little too early. So I took her face from a different picture and added it as another layer to the photo. To clean it up I deleted the edges with a soft edged low opacity eraser.

 

The final result.

 

I wanted to create a spread that was graphic and bold but didn’t feel out of place with the rest of the album. These photos were great candidates because they although they are nice they could use a little something plus they weren’t peoples faces. Going really graphic with people’s faces can be really neat high art but would be out of place with the rest of the book.

Before

 

After. I bumped up the contrast, brought back some of the details using Image>Adjustments>Levels, and increased the yellow & red under Image>Adjustments>Color Balance.

 

Then I deleted the branch in the top right hand corner so that I could make the white sky of the two pictures blend together.

 

I love the layout of this picture, but I needed it to match the other photo in the spread.

 

When I similarly increased the contrast a blue tint appeared over my dress and bouquet.

 

So I increased the yellow. But this made my already yellow looking bouquet (compared to the dress) look really yellow. So I went back to the original photo. Took the unaltered bouquet and put it over the yellow bouquet.

 

**Super Important Tip: Always, always keep at least one copy of the original picture. You can only “undo” so many times in Photoshop. If you learn anything from this blog let this be it.

 

I liked this shot because of the grass, the trees, and that we are off center.

 

So I changed the levels, darkened the edges of the picture with the burn tool, and took the sunburst from another photo to draw the eye up. I thought it made the photo nice and dramatic. But I did all this Photoshopping and missed something…

 

Katie, Libby’s assistant photographer, jumping behind us trying to get out of the shot! It was the first thing I noticed when I saw this page in the album. Looking at a little 5″ spread on your monitor and seeing the full 19×13″ spread in an actual album are two totally different things. That’s why this page is hilarious. Now Katie will be in our wedding album forever. I just know I’m going to be pointing out her white Irish leg to my grandkids.

 

The original picture of us being surprised. Cute but blah.

 

Quickly livened it up with a warm photo filter. Image>Adjustments>Photo Filter>Warm Filter (85) at a really low opacity

 

The background of the shot was boring. The doorway was the unique part so I cropped out the background.

 

But that sharp white corner where my dress was cut off was really bugging me so I decided to just let it overflow. Perfect. I carefully cleaned up the edges so that it didn’t have that weird blue screen look and wah-lah.

 

I liked this shot because we were trying to get people to stop clicking there glasses for us to kiss so we did a big dramatic kiss. I also really liked the candid nature of this shot and the look on peoples faces.

 

So I rotated and cropped the guy out of the photo as much as I could. Notice how the guy’s shoulder is up at a strange angle. Buy just doing those two simple steps I was able to salvage a great shot of us about to kiss.

 

55 Years of Photos

Earlier this year my grandparents had their 55th wedding anniversary and I wanted to make something special for them. The problem was that I was still in school at the time and didn’t have time to go over to their house until the day before the anniversary party. I borrowed a bunch of pictures and albums from them and spent all night sorting, scanning, and restoring pictures.

This is what I came up with. It may not be the best work I’ve ever done but I was able to do in one evening.

Besides fixing scanning dust spots I did have to do some quick Photoshopping. I loved this photo of my grandma riding in a boat, but my grandpa isn’t paying attention.

So I took his head from a similar shot.

Here’s the result.

I also had to copy the tree line and repeat it to soften the harsh edges of the curtain.

My favorite picture though was a picture no one knew they had. After some prodding my grandma remembered an old photo she had in the bottom of her sock drawer. She pulled out an adorable picture of them at a high school dance. It turns out this is the first picture they have together and nobody has ever seen it!

Unfortunately, because this photos was kept in a sock drawer it was bent, ripped, and scratched. So I did some quick Photoshopping. (Before)

After

 

Before

 

After

My grandparents loved it! They were suspicious when I borrowed the albums the day before but didn’t think I could actually get something done by the next day. And to think my quick little Photoshop project would lead to us finding a great family heirloom.

How to Create Album Templates

Update: You no longer need to follow this tutorial to make templates for Blurb. You can find my free Blurb templates and lots of other Blurb tutorials in the “Want to Make a Blurb Book?” link.

A lot of people have been asking about how I set up templates for the albums I’ve created. I typically only use Photoshop to do this, even for wording. This is because most of the album companies use jpeg files to create the albums. So instead of messing around with InDesign (which doesn’t directly save to a jpeg format) I just stick with Photoshop.

So here’s how to set up an album template for any type of album in 8 steps. I’ll use my Blurb book as an example (a 13×11” hardcover book).

1.) First, you need to calculate what size your spread (two facing pages) needs to be. For a 13×11” Blurb book that would be 10.9” high and 25.2” wide. You can find the page sizes for other sized books at

http://blurberatiblog.com/index.php/2007/04/24/look-no-further-for-full-bleed-page-specs/.

 

2.) Now that you have your page size, in Photoshop open a new file and change height and width to the spread size you just found. Make sure that your dpi (dots per inch) is set to 300 pixels/inch. Then click on the advanced arrow and make sure the color profile says sRGB IEC61966-2.1. This is the color profile Blurb and many other similar companies will convert your pictures to if they aren’t already in that format. When your finished click OK.

 

3.) Next you can change your background color using the paint bucket tool. Simply click on your color palette (the two colored boxes near the bottom of your toolbar) and select the color you’d like your background to be. Make sure your background color is in the box on the top then click the paint bucket tool to your spread. This is convenient if you are using one color as your main background color but don’t worry if you want to change it in the future you can.

 

The next step is to set up guides to designate your trim and “safety” areas. To create full bleed pages printing companies print the pages and then trim off part of the area they printed so that the colors bleed right to the edges. If they didn’t do this there would be nowhere for equipment to grip the page while the ink is still wet. Blurb recommends that you design for a 1/8” trim all the way around your spread. I also like to create a 1/8” “safety” area so that I make sure nothing important is cut off the page. In this buffer area I make sure to not have any text, heads, hands, feet, or other important part of the page. It’s not uncommon for a printing company to accidently trim off more than they suggest, but even if they do my page will still look good.

 

4.) There are two ways to put a guide on your spread. The first way is to drag one from one of the rulers around the spread (if you don’t have rulers set up on your page you can go to View>Rulers). The other way is to go to View>New Guide, select a vertical or horizontal direction, and enter in a dimension. The second way is more accurate and I would recommend you use it when setting up a template.

For a 13×11” Blurb book with 1/8” trim area and 1/8” safety area you would need to enter in the following guides:

Vertical: 0.125”, 0.25”, 24.95”, and 25.075”

Horizontal: 0.125”, 0.25”, 10.65”, and 10.775”

 

5.) Next, you need to add a guide to designate the separation between each page. To do this simply divide the total width in half and add a vertical guide there. For my Blurb book this would be 12.6”.

 

6.) Now you need to create the trim and safety guides for the center of the spread. If you are making a flush mount album (like my wedding album where the picture is not lost to binding) you can skip this step. However, the vast majority of albums you or I can create are not flush mount so we have to add more guides.

The amount of space to leave for the binding is not really specified on the Blurb website. This area is called the gutter and in the final product you won’t be able to see anything that was on the page there. After reading through many forum posts I seemed to find that many people used 1/8” on each page for the gutter. When I did my honeymoon album, however, I added a 1/8” safety area on both sides. I treated this area as the gutter too. Making a 1/4” gutter on each page or 1/2” total. The two page photo spreads in our honeymoon book turned out really well using this gutter size.

For my Blurb book I added a vertical guide at 12.35″ and 12.85.”

 

To get a better visual idea of which areas will be trimmed off I created the visuals below. The pink area will be trimmed off, the blue area is the safety area that may be cropped off, and the purple area in the center is the area I treat like a trim area but may actual appear in the album.

 

7.) Next, I add center lines for each page. This makes centering photos on a page much easier because tools and objects snap to guides. If you add a photo or a shape to your template the edges and center of that shape will snap to any guides you have.

For my Blurb book example I added a vertical guide at 6.3″ and 18.9.” Then I added a horizontal guide at 5.45″ to finish it off.

 

8.) Finally, save your template with a general name like “Album Template.” This way for each new spread you create you can simply start with this file and you’ll know that none of the guides have been moved (which can be really easy to do while making your layout).

 

Note: After you’re done with your layouts crop the spread in half along the center guide. To do this use the crop tool (in the tool palette or simply press C). Save the files as jpegs at the highest resolution possible numbering the files with the corresponding page numbers. Don’t worry the guides won’t appear in the jpegs. Lastly, upload to whichever site you are using to make your book. You should have each page as a separate jpeg.