Making photo books for my trips has been on my “to do” list for years. For one reason or another I never seem to get around to it. I went to Peru to lead a photo workshop along the Amazon River this year, and I figured THAT trip deserves a book if nothing else does!
The nice folks at Saal Digital offered me a photo book so I could try their printing service. I decided to use their book design software to design the book, but you can also upload a PDF to place an order.
I found the design software to be very straightforward. It was easy for me to choose my book settings and put my images into the app. There are lots of different themes and style options to choose from. I decided against heavily themed layouts and went with the Basic style. Te style contains tons of layout options and I found several that I liked. Once you choose the page layout you simply drag the images you want to use onto the space you’d like it to go.
There are options for adding text, but I did find that part of the software rather limiting. For example- I would have liked to put a simple caption on a couple of the images, but I couldn’t find a way to simply put white text on top of an image. You can put a box with text, but I didn’t find any other way to do it. It is very possible that I just didn’t find the place to make this happen, but I feel like I was pretty thorough.
I chose an 8.5”x11” photo book with matte photo paper and a non-padded cover. All of the options for your book are handled within the app and the whole ordering process was smooth and easy.
The book was printed and shipped with a few days of my order and it came much sooner than I expected. I was thrilled when the finished book arrived! The printing is outstanding. The colors are spot-on and I love the finish of the matte paper. It has a similar appearance to traditional fibre photo paper. Not too shiny, not too matte.
The lay-flat binding means that two-page spreads look awesome. You can open the book all the way and the two facing pages look like one single print. All-in-all I was very pleased with the quality of the finished product.
I will be bringing this photo book along to trade shows and dealer events to showcase my work with my Olympus cameras. The print quality shows off the color and sharpness of my images, and the build quality of the Saal Digital book looks like it will stand up to lots of trade show handling!
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