PhotoBOOK of the Week!

Sorry for the lack of blogging over here on Simply Suz. I've been busy creating a photo book (using Blurb's Booksmart, my fave) of our summer vacation to Alaska. About 2 weeks ago, I received an email from Blurb offering 20% off my next book.* Here's the catch, I had less than a month to finish it. I'm a frugal lady & will do almost anything to take advantage of a sale. I've also found that I need motivation to start & finish a Blurb book & a sale is just the ticket to kick me into high gear.

This was my 6th Blurb book (have I mentioned I'm a very happy customer? I've written about blurb once, twice, three times already!) & probably took the most time & effort. I've become more comfortable using their software, which meant that I created custom layouts for almost every page. For the control freak like me, that's a huge selling point. If you don't like Blurb's preset layouts, or want to tweak the size of a photo or text box, you can edit the layouts.

Once I painstakingly went through hundreds of photos & picked out my favorites, tweaked or created new layouts, & wrote a little travelogue, I finally gave my book a good once-over... Overall, I was pleased. Thankfully, my little blog series gave me a head start. A lot of my favorite photos were already picked out & I'd already written about our whirlwind vacation in detail right here on the blog. (I'd already done the hard part).

When I previewed the book, I did notice that some of the photos looked a little fuzzy, which puzzled me. We'd just bought a fancy-schmancy new camera & the photos were super big with amazing resolution (in fact, I plan on blowing up this one in canvas & putting on our mantel). After searching Blurb FAQs & finally emailing customer support, I discovered that my photos were just too-dang-big. Jamming all of those megapixels into teeny image boxes distorted the photo. And here I thought low-resolution would be my only problem! I had to go through each & every photo in the book (319 to be exact), determine the "optimal resolution" in Blurb, open in Picasa, export a lower-resolution copy of the original photo, import that copy into Blurb & replace the original file. It. took. forever.

In the end, I'm glad I took the extra time. I would have been super bummed had the book come in the mail & all of the photos were fuzzy! I thought y'all might want to take a looksie (note that the blurry photos exist in this little preview, the photos you see are a lower resolution "placeholder" if you will, of the actual files). If you read my Alaska series, a lot of the photos will look familiar, but feel free to flip through if you're at all curious! Consider putting together a Blurb book of your own. You won't be disappointed!

*Psst....Want to make your own book & get a 20% discount? Finish & upload your book by November 26th & enter "PROMO" at checkout.