With the holidays coming up, I thought it’d be cool to make a book of pictures for a gift. I’d also recently read Scott Kelby’s article on different photo book options, and as I liked the look of the iPhoto one the most, decided to give that a shot…
Above you can see a couple of the pages of the book.
The process itself was pretty easy – I basically did exactly what Scott demonstrated on the video on his blog:
1. Select all the photos that I wanted in the book (or at least the photos that I thought I wanted… when I started filling the book, I discovered that some photos weren’t really fitting well, and others came to mind that I wanted to include).
2. Drag onto the iPhoto icon.
3. Start dragging and dropping the photos onto the different pages on the book.
4. Press ‘buy book’.
5. Done!
Admittedly, there was quite a bit of faffing around in step 3. Deciding the order of the book pages… and deciding what the captions were going to be… and what the introduction is going to say… and so on. Also, it was magically easy to change a page from two images to one, or from one image taking up the entire page, to one image which has space for a caption also.
Another couple of nice touches which I liked were the front and back cover – the latter where I decided to use my very-under-used ‘about me’ picture of me taking a picture out of a car window. Another cool thing (though I only used it sparingly) was that you could make the background of a page either white, grey, or you could actually make the background one of your pictures. The beauty of the last option is that you can then ‘fade’ the background picture to almost-white (I guess in PS-speak, you can change the opacity of the image). Creatively that’s quite cool – you could have (for example) a faded picture of oak barrels as the page background, and then the main full colour image could be a bottle of Whisky, where the background gives some informational background to the main picture as well.
EDIT: Follow up post when the book arrived, and a picture of the book, is here…