Book Publishing

[pemongillo]

I really don't know where to have this discussion. I wish to create a number of photo books to document my 50 years as a photographer. I don't care about selling them or at least I don't care about making money from them. I have spent considerable time watching YouTube videos and landed on Blurb to give it a try. It has good reviews and you can produce the book in Lightroom and upload directly to Blurb. I must say that the all B&W test book I had printed was not good. The images were flat with a green color cast. I provided them with the file types they asked for including the color profile they requested etc. and my screen is always calibrated for making my own prints. Anyone have any luck getting good B&W quality from any book publishers? None of them seem to have user forums. Thanks

[Dave Carhart]

I'm just at the beginning of the book / zine making thing and after looking at numerous YT videos and publishers web pages, I've decided to do it myself.  I don't plan on a lot of books, or a lot of pages in the books.  So I've decided to DIY (being retired with LOTS of extra time in the winter helps).  I use paper from Red River in Texas and they have a section on papers suitable for books/zines.  I'm still in the organizing photos stage and haven't order any of these particular papers yet, but I've used red river card and calendar paper with great luck.

Here's a link to the recommendations I got from one of their support people.

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You could use the Aurora Art 250 paper for more of a fine art book, we have had several customers use this paper. If you are printing with a pigment-based printer on either fine art or matte paper, we would recommend using a slip sheet in between each print to reduce the risk of the ink rubbing off to the following print. https://www.redrivercatalog.com/infocenter/2sidedinkjetprinting.html

 

The most popular papers for zines can be found on the following link, these are available in flat sheets: https://www.redrivercatalog.com/sbproject/paper-for-magazine-printing-and-mockups_2.html

 

For already scored 8.5x11 papers, we have these options: https://www.redrivercatalog.com/cardshop/scored/85x11scored.htm

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there's also a couple of very good YT videos on DIY bookbinding.

EDIT:  Keith Cooper just put out a YT video on adjusting your monitor to make your prints look better / good. I know that before I calibrated my monitor, my print always looked a little "off"   

Here's a link to his video

 

Edited December 23, 2022 by Dave Carhart

[qtluong]

For a short-run book, I suggest that you check bookmobile.com.

They are geared to the fine-art market and the quality is excellent, judging from the book made by truenortheditions.com that I own. 

[AlanKlein]

I just ordered my first soft cover photo book from Blurb in color.  I have Lightroom Classic but decided to use Blurb's own program to create the book.  It was pretty easy with a lot of flexibility. 

Since it was just ordered, I can't tell you how it came out.   It's due around mid January.  Contact me and I'll let you know.   Blurb has resources that explain a lot of things about book design and publishing.

https://www.blurb.com/publishing-resources

[John Di Leo]

Hi, Alan,

I am curious how it came out?

[movingfinger]

I made a self-published book on blurb and I was very pleased with the results. I used lightroom to create the book and just shipped the result to blurb. I did go with the highest quality paper. You can see the resulting book, which has both color and BW images, on the blurb website as I make the entire thing preview-able. On my screen the images look like they do in the finished paper publication. You can find it here and see for yourself, click on 'preview'. 

[AlanKlein]

On 4/20/2023 at 2:11 PM, movingfinger said:

I made a self-published book on blurb and I was very pleased with the results. I used lightroom to create the book and just shipped the result to blurb. I did go with the highest quality paper. You can see the resulting book, which has both color and BW images, on the blurb website as I make the entire thing preview-able. On my screen the images look like they do in the finished paper publication. You can find it here and see for yourself, click on 'preview'. 

Very nice.   Labor of love.   I did my first Blurb soft cover of my grandson's first birthday party.  The first came out too dark but they re-did it after I lightened it up in Lightroom first. 

[david_henderson]

I have used Blurb for well  over 20 books, like you pretty much all for my own purposes.  They include a few books of b&w photographs, and  quite frequently a book comprising mainly colour work also includes some b&w.  The b&w photographs include some film photos where I've scanned prints, and some digital work.  They all look pretty much as I intend.  As it happens I have from the start & still do assemble my Blurb books in Blurb's original software, Booksmart.  I don't think that'll make much difference, its just what I'm used to.

Speaking entirely as I find my experience is that I can get photographs as contrasty as I want them and without colour cast unless I've put them there on purpose to emulate toning decisions made on the original prints.  Likewise  the colour photographs look pretty much like they appear on my colour-corrected screen- but that's a Dell Ultrasharp rather than anything fancy.  I calibrate my screen with a I1 Display Pro.  

IMO if you are getting colour casts and your pictures appear much less contrasty then the likeliest scenario is that your colour management is askew . If that's so you may well find that changing book printer doesn't help much if at all.  Unlike the situation many years back , many labs (for prints) and book publishers are capable of turning out decently accurate colours and contrasts so long as the input material is OK.  But they assume its OK as you send it , so if you send them b&w that's neutral on your machine but not neutral on theirs they will assume that what they see is what you want. 

There is one small exception.  There is a tendency for printed photographs on paper to be a little duller,  a little less bright & contrasty,  than they appear on a backlit screen. I do compensate for this by boosting contrast and saturation/brightness a little on book submissions.  In other words the material I transmit to Blurb is contrastier/brighter than the way I like to see that work on screen.  But we're talking a little here; fine-tuning if you like.  If your pages look green my betting would be that you are not managing colour accurately.

The other thing you might want to consider is if your preparing your images under artificial light, what are those lights doing to the way your images look on screen?   The lighting in my office is not even remotely similar to the way the rest of the house is lit.  It's much more "daylight"  so I can edit in daylight or at night believing that when I look at the night time edits the following noon I'm not going to want to do them all over again.