TIPS & TRICKS FOR USING PHOTOBOOKS SOFTWARE

Book Monitor
Two-Page Spreads
Adjusting & cropping your pictures
Black & white and sepia filters, fading
Aligning pictures
Removing & duplicating frames/pictures
Photo book cover
Designing pages in Adobe Photoshop®

BOOK MONITOR

Using the Book Monitor feature, you can see issues that arise in your photo book in real-time. By default, the Book Monitor is set to on. If the Book Monitor has been turned off, go to the View menu and click “Show Book Monitor.”

A new bar will appear underneath the photo book pages scrollbar. If everything is 100% fine within your book, the bar will be blank. If however, there are issues with any page, color-coded boxes will appear for those pages with errors.

The color of the arrow at the left indicates the most serious of the problems within the book. Placing the cursor over a color-coded error box will display a page’s problems, and allow you to go directly to the page to make changes.

Multiple problems on a single page with the same color-code will be represented by a single box of the pertinent color.

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TWO-PAGE SPREADS

Any of your pictures can be used as a background for a two-page spread. Just drag a picture from the Image Browser to a page (but not onto a frame), and when asked “Would you like your picture to be used as a background for a single page, or across a two-page spread?” click the Two-Page Spread button.

NOTE: When using a landscape picture for a two-page spread background, it’s often best to use a portrait orientation book. Also, faces should be kept out of the gutter, as some of their fine details may be lost or distorted within the spine.

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ADJUSTING & CROPPING YOUR PICTURES

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BLACK & WHITE AND SEPIA FILTERS, FADING

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ALIGNING PICTURES

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REMOVING & DUPLICATING FRAMES/PICTURES

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PHOTO BOOK COVER

The design process for the cover of your photo book is the same as for the interior pages, except that you cannot use separate backgrounds for the front & back covers, nor can you see the front & back covers at the same time. Otherwise, frames captions, grids, and so on behave exactly as they do within the book.

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DESIGNING PAGES IN ADOBE PHOTOSHOP®

If you plan to design some or all of your pages in Adobe Photoshop®, there are a few more things you need to know:

Bleed – when one or more sides of a printed image touch the edge of the paper. The use of bleed guarantees that the finished (cropped) page will look neat & precise. The page bleed allowance should be 1/8 inch at all four sides of the page. The bleed area (i.e. beyond the crop marks) will be trimmed off. If you use a background color or image, it should fill the entire page including the bleed area. For example, if your printed page size is 8.3 inch wide, your page design should be 8.55 inch wide with the bleed (1/8” + 8.3” + 1/8”).

Page Spread – this is a page design than spans both right & left-hand pages. The pages are centered at the gutter where they are bound into the spine. Approximately 1/4" of the spread will be bound into (and thus hidden within) the spine. This, in of itself, is not a problem, but it does require a bit of special attention when using an external tool, such as Adobe Photoshop to create your page designs:

Be sure to leave bleed on all 4 sides. The My Photo Books software will automatically adjust any background used as if it has a bleed designed into it.

Keep important design details at least 1/8” from all sides of the page (1/4” is even better) so that unwelcome trimming does not occur.

Keep important design details an extra 1/4" away from the center binding (this is in addition to the bleed you leave on all 4 sides of the page). This is an issue specifically for single page designs.

The software will adjust the spread pages for the 1/4" lost within the spine. To this end, the spread should be designed to be 1/4" smaller than the size that it would be if you were to include the gutter. Also, keep in mind that although page spreads are well suited for panoramic picture backgrounds, fine details may be partially obscured within the binding.

The following table is a guide to page and spread size design:

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