Creating a photobook from digital images

Anyone know any place in Munich that can create decent photobooks?

I know you can do this stuff online with services like www.Qoop.com but they don't provide much flexibility from page to page. Also, Qoop grabs images from sites like www.Flickr.com but they limit the amount of uploads unless you get premium membership.

Cheers.

To what extent are you wanting the book to be done by someone else?
Do you need someone to design, print & bind?
I can help with the first two steps and recommend a great binder for the final step.

Well, I can do the design - but I guess I would need to use some software supported by the people who print.

I don't want to just print on some home colour printer because I doubt the results would be very good.

And I guess it would make sense for the people who print to do the binding as well!

When we do our photobooks here at work, we print them oursleves (on a prof colour laser printer) from Adobe InDesign and then take the prints to the binder to be bound.

The software commonly used in the industry is Adobe InDesign & Quark. Alternatively you can save it as a printable PDF (ie no compression) and take that to a printer to get printed.

If you want the contact details of our bookbinder then let me know.

Check out www.fotobuch.de.They do the full service. You can upload as many pictures as you wish and customize to your hearts' desire. I've used it many times. Qulaity is great and looks just a real book. Also very reasonably priced.

@nuwoman - Yeah, that website looks great, thanks. Shame the books are limited to 96 sides - I could do with double that! But it might be enough, I suppose...

@Timmeh - Well, Adobe InDesign costs money... and so the PDF solution is a way forward for me. Know any good printers?

Unfortunately i don't know of any low volume printer as we print this kind of stuff ourselves.

Here is a link to the trial version of InDesign CS2, hopefully the trial version will be featured enough to format a book layout.

Remember to have all of your images as 300 dpi tiffs for printing.

Checkout Pixaco - they have photo books starting from €14.95 for 24 pages and have all manner of variants, incuding stapled, ringbound, soft and hard covered...

anyone know if you can get piccies printed from memory card in store whilst you wait or within a couple of hrs or overnight like you can do at Asda in the UK?

Yes, I know Saturn do it. You can have an hour service or else a few days. Just go in with the memory card/stick and choose the photos that you want off of it and burn them onto a CD there.

Most Rossmann stores have photostations, as does Wall-Mart.

@YorkshireLad6 - Thanks for that - Yeah Pixaco allows up to 144 pages which is about 50% more than Fotobuch - great although Fotobuch can do pages that are 50% bigger! So that works out about the same.

Checking out the software for both sites and the Fotobuch one looks a bit more comprehensive - overlaying photos, many more different layouts etc - so I'll probably go for that one - a cool 70EUR!

SIM - cheers for the info. do you know if they can print them too?
or is it just to CD? Really need them printed.

Got the photo book delivered this week (from fotobuch.de)- must say the quality is very good. I only used a compact 3MP camera and even the full A4 page shots look fine.

On the downside, many of the photos look grainier than what I would expect from magazine quality even though the pages are printed at 300dpi. I don't think this is a problem for most but maybe the trained eye would have a problem with it.

So, you build the book with their software and then upload it - at 400Mb its worth reconsidering this if you've only got dial-up internet access Yeah, you can send them a CD instead...

If you're using a 3MP camera, at 300dpi you only have full resoultion for approx. 6"x6" images. Any cropping that you do will further reduce the full res. size.

print, sqrt(3e6)/300
5.77350

Yes, but its the same for photos of all sizes. Actually, the full size photos look no worse than the quarter-page or eighth-page photos. Also, cropping is not to blame in this case.

It seems more to do with the colours. Some colours show it up more than others. But like I say, its no big deal. I'm very happy with the general result.

I know people who did it through www.fotobuch.de
Don't know much about it, but they seemed pretty happy with it.

@westmeadboy,
Did you do any conversion of your images? Most consumer cameras take photos at 72dpi in jpeg format, well below print quality.

This is interesting. I had always presumed that dpi just related to the physical size of an image on a printed media, rather than being 'set' in a camera. How does this work? I understand it as dots per pixel, so a 600x600 image would be 2"x2" at 300dpi or ~9"x9" at 72dpi - have I got the wrong end of the stick?

read here

and here

Common Image Sizes and Print Sizes at 300 dpi*
Image Size Megapixels Native Print Size
(in inches)
4064 x 2704 11.1 13.5 x 9
3088 x 2056 6.3 10.25 x 6.8
3008 x 1960 5.3 10 x 6.5
2048 x 1536 3.0 6.8 x 5.1
1600 x 1200 2.0 5.3 x 4**
1280 x 960 1.2 4.25 x 3.2
640 x 480 0.3 2.1 x 1.6

Correct

Ja, this is correct. There are a few things you can do in order to improve print quality from a consumer camera within photoshop etc.

We use a 39 megapixel camera here for digital images that go to print, with each image file size being around 100mb, and these still don't look as good as analogue, so it's understandable that your consumer camera images, when put to print look a little pixelated.

But file size has nothing to do with quality. Quality is a function of file size and print area (size). A 1MB image printed on a postage stamp will have the better quality than a 100MB image on an A3 poster.

Back to my book...

I'm convinced this slightly granular appearance is nothing to do with the original digital images. Even the images (3MP and about 2MB, JPEG) pasted into a small area on the page about 2 or 3 square inches look a little grainy. Those images do not look grainy maxed on my 1400x1050 screen.

Maybe the fotobuch software is doing something really shitty but I doubt it because its been used thousands of times by others before.

I think it still looks really good - just not magazine quality...