australian photo calendar publisher

[sufran]

Which company would you recommend to print photo calendars (i.e. calendars using your own photos) in Australia? I want an Australian company as none of the OS companies I have identified include Australian public holidays in their calendars (understandably) . I would like a calendar with a good finish, the option to include more than one photo in the picture section, the ability to easily customise the photos (including making a photo into a background) and to be able to insert information into the date section of the calendar. I have used Snapfish and Albumworks, and My Reflections (which is now being sold to Albumworks). I would really appreciate any other suggestions based on people's experiences. Thanks.

[golftragic]

If you use a Mac computer Apple's calendars, which can be accessed via iPhoto or Aperture, give you all the options you're looking for. You'd need to insert the Aussie holiday information yourself but that's not hard to do and you can also insert any other information, e.g. family birthdays, with or without thumbnail pics of the person.

[sufran]

Thanks - I have heard good things about the Apple options - but I'm Windows!

[OzzieTraveller]

G'day Sufran

What sort of qualtities are you talking about ... personal or commercial??
Will you need to go into cmyk colour mode? etc etc

Regards, Phil

[sufran]

Hi, just for personal use - presents. I find I like the software flexibility of one of the companies, and the image quality of another of the Australian companies (but apart from their one picture to a month option, I find the software not to be so user friendly). I have "googled," but sometimes, not all the options come up. So I was hoping that someone maybe had discovered a start-up enterprise, for example, that would be worth investigating.

[davros]

Some print shops have plugins for Adobe Indesign if you have a copy of that. You build the product in Indesign and export it to their software. I haven't gone this route, but noticed it as an option with Blurb when I did my last book through them. I'm pretty happy with their product, being the first print house I've used. The colours all came out as expected. My only grip was that there is a bit of aliasing on the front cover picture. I had done quite a bit of post work on that image though so it could have been in the image file.

edit: Another option would be to build it in PS or acrobat and export it as a pdf. There are a few places that will convert pdf to their format. I'm not sure what that will do to your colour space settings though.