Dylan & Marianne
31-01-2011, 8:37pm
For the last couple of months, I've alluded to the fact that I have been making a photobook for the Nepal section of my recent travels. I finally have the finished photobook in hand and thought I'd share a few pros and cons about albumworks .
The software:
- It gives a few good positioning tools like autocentering to page height, width, or spread if you are doing a cross spread double page.
- The resizing is completely UNintuitive whereby you cannot lock aspect ratios without putting a frame around the picture first.
- The frames and borders they provide with the software are very unsubtle and hence I hardly used any of them. The simple borders however were neat and I ended up using these almost exclusively. Looks to me like the emphasis of the albumworks 'look' isn't something sleek or corporate but rather a fluffy ,happy looking children/family style album book.
- The markers for limits of printing were on the whole pretty accurate when it came down to the end product.
Product Options:
- these were far fewer than for momento.
- very limited in terms of faux linen, dust jackets, embossing etc. Don't expect anything fancy here.
The Ordering Process:
Very simple. I ordered on a Monday night, they told me the order was ready on a Thursday night and I received the 120page 30cmX30cm book today.
The Actual Product
-My first impression thumbing through it was " gee this looks great! I probably won't have to go through momento any more "
- The reason for this : despite the cover limitations, it still looked very good minimalistic. The images seemed to be the right brightness and the colours were true as they appeared on my monitor at home. The text was very crisp , clear and surprisingly larger than expected. The pages were reasonably thick though not quite as thick as the momento products.
- BUT , there were some pretty major issues
- Alot of the pages seemed warped : I'm not sure if this is because of the heat of the last 2 days (40 degree + in adelaide)
- Many of the white borders had bleed of colours into the white - so much so that Marianne (who didn't look at the proofs closely) thought that I had chosen some funky blend border option.
- Only one of the images had a strange horizontal band across it.
- One of the pages appeared to have stuck to another resulting in a tear off of some ink - lucky it was on a black double page spread so the impact is not on any text or image but it still looks weird.
The Price overall was 180AUD with shipping which is half the cost of what it would have been with momento (if not cheaper). The issues of quality though, I'm not too happy with. Given that we have a lot of vouchers for momento, I'm tempted to use them and repeat the procedure though it would be an expensive experiment. We had made a previous book of our 2006 trip and I really can't compare the quality of images because we were shooting some terrible stuff back then.
What experiences have you had with this kind of project?
The software:
- It gives a few good positioning tools like autocentering to page height, width, or spread if you are doing a cross spread double page.
- The resizing is completely UNintuitive whereby you cannot lock aspect ratios without putting a frame around the picture first.
- The frames and borders they provide with the software are very unsubtle and hence I hardly used any of them. The simple borders however were neat and I ended up using these almost exclusively. Looks to me like the emphasis of the albumworks 'look' isn't something sleek or corporate but rather a fluffy ,happy looking children/family style album book.
- The markers for limits of printing were on the whole pretty accurate when it came down to the end product.
Product Options:
- these were far fewer than for momento.
- very limited in terms of faux linen, dust jackets, embossing etc. Don't expect anything fancy here.
The Ordering Process:
Very simple. I ordered on a Monday night, they told me the order was ready on a Thursday night and I received the 120page 30cmX30cm book today.
The Actual Product
-My first impression thumbing through it was " gee this looks great! I probably won't have to go through momento any more "
- The reason for this : despite the cover limitations, it still looked very good minimalistic. The images seemed to be the right brightness and the colours were true as they appeared on my monitor at home. The text was very crisp , clear and surprisingly larger than expected. The pages were reasonably thick though not quite as thick as the momento products.
- BUT , there were some pretty major issues
- Alot of the pages seemed warped : I'm not sure if this is because of the heat of the last 2 days (40 degree + in adelaide)
- Many of the white borders had bleed of colours into the white - so much so that Marianne (who didn't look at the proofs closely) thought that I had chosen some funky blend border option.
- Only one of the images had a strange horizontal band across it.
- One of the pages appeared to have stuck to another resulting in a tear off of some ink - lucky it was on a black double page spread so the impact is not on any text or image but it still looks weird.
The Price overall was 180AUD with shipping which is half the cost of what it would have been with momento (if not cheaper). The issues of quality though, I'm not too happy with. Given that we have a lot of vouchers for momento, I'm tempted to use them and repeat the procedure though it would be an expensive experiment. We had made a previous book of our 2006 trip and I really can't compare the quality of images because we were shooting some terrible stuff back then.
What experiences have you had with this kind of project?