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I’ve recently put a bunch of my Astro images into a large photo book to share with family and friends. I found that people really like it. It’s a great way to share the hobby and get all those great images off your hard drive and in places where people can see them (besides AstroBin of course). I used Blurb, but there are lots of other companies that do this. And it’s easy and amazingly cheap. This 80-page book cost $75 to print. The companies have free software you use to make the book. Could be great Christmas presents. I put text and descriptions in mine, but you don’t have to. A book of just your images would be nice. Try it.    |
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Looks great! I’ve tried several services and always had trouble with their print quality and balance. They typically would come out washed out or too dark. How did you manage this with Blurb?
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I haven't had any problems with image quality. I think Blurb uses pretty high-quality printers. There certainly can be issues with RGB to CMYK color conversion - maybe that's what happened with yours. I have found that Blurb works well with plain old JPG files in RGB color space using their Bookwright software. This is the second book I tried and I did it in InDesign using RGB JPGs and it seemed to work well. If you know what you're doing, you can convert to CMYK in Photoshop before importing, but that seems to be a lot of work and I try to keep things simple.
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Very nice. I once used such print-on-demand service for other documents, but not photos yet. For photo exhibition, comparing to online galleries like Astrobin or Flickr, a problem I found about the book format is layout. Astrophotos come in good mixtures of landscape and portrait orientations. And there is usually not a single book layout that works equally good for photos of both landscape and portrait orientations. For example, your book seems to be optimized for landscape photos. Photos of portrait orientation will have smaller enlargements in this layout so some details in the photos will be harder to see. Do you have any thoughts about this?
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Yes, you are correct about vertical photos, but most astro-images can be cropped/rotated to look good horizontal. My book has a few vertical images and they are much smaller - although the book is 11" x 13" so they are still large enough to see well. You could make the book in portrait mode so verticals would be featured better.
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Great idea to make a coffee table book filled with astrophotos, and your book looks absolutely stunning. Do you provide any special preparations of your printed images compared to online publishing, @WAskywatcher? I am asking because my experience with astro print is limited to making calendars and send them to people as christmas gifts. I have found that an image that looks nice on a big, back-lit LCD screen, easily becomes very dark on paper, so I give the images some +/- 25% more lightness before sent to the print shop. The calendar image below is the same image (but with adjusting some extra illumination) as this one: https://www.astrobin.com/657dz4/ Martin  |
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I did the same a couple of years ago as I felt I wanted something that was not going to get lost in cyberspace over the years, plus many family and friends don't have a clue how to find them on the net. I am currently working on Book 11. I found a nice printer in the UK (Book Printing UK), they were excellent and sent me samples of the colour result using a few of my images and the colour came out very well. Did all my own artwork, so I told my story of how I got into it all with some photos of kit etc.   |
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Congratulations, the examples you have shown are beautiful, and also, this quote, from Carole, https://www.astrobin.com/users/carastro/ "something that was not going to get lost in cyberspace over the years, plus many family and friends don't have a clue how to find them on the net" is true.
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Carol – beautiful book, and I agree about stuff getting lost in cyberspace. The book makes it permanent and can be past down and cherished.
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Martin – Calendars are a great idea, and yes, getting color and brightness right can be an issue. Our images are naturally dark and look nice on screens that way, but print is different. , Unless you have a fancy professional calibrated monitor ($$$$$), the best thing to do is to compare your image side-by-side in your image editing program (like Photoshop) with some really good images from AstroBin, and then do a small test project. Your image is probably a bit on the dark side, so your brightness boost was a good call and it looks great on the calendar.
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The book makes it permanent and can be past down and cherished. Yes that was another thought I had in mind at the time. My next book will be obviously my next collection of images, plus I will also take the opportunity to add my underwater photos I took over the years snorkeling at various coral reefs. Carole |
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Carastro: Wow. Outer and inner space. Pretty cool! |
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Looks very professional. Carole |
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This 80-page book cost $75 to print. The companies have free software you use to make the book. Could be great Christmas presents. I put text and descriptions in mine, but you don’t have to. A book of just your images would be nice. Try it. So $75 gets you how many copies of an 80 page book ... ? |
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One copy of the book. This is the going rate for quality large format short run printing.
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Great idea and I love the title.
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What a great idea. Looks awesome 👍
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I paid around £200 in early 2019 for about 15 copies. 80 pages hard back. I did all the artwork. Carole |
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Carastro: That’s a good price. Where did you have them done? A UK printer? |
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Yes in Peterborough area. https://www.bookprintinguk.com/ it has probably gone up since then and l think it might have been £230 after all can’t quite remember now. I didn't apply for a Publishing code ISBN as l only sold to family and friends. That can add a fair amount to the cost, so if you're not thinking of trying to sell it to the general public there is no need. If you are teally interested pm me and l will try to look it up. They were really helpful, sent samples out so you knew what to order, and customer service was excellent. They even sent me some sample prints of my images so I could see how they woujld reproduce as I have done printing for my local astro group and the images came out darker than the originals. BookPrinting UK was an accurate representation of my images. I am compoling a 2nd book, and I shall use them again . Carole |
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This is a great idea! I’m on my calendar for this years Christmas gifts right now. This book idea is really cool! Great examples by @WAskywatcher & @Carastro! I’ll have to look into this at some point! Dale |
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I decided to sign up and play around with this site. Kinda anxious to see what I can do with my stuff. Again thanks for the info! Dale |
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I have "printed" my photos onto Acrylic (Direct Print) and will hang those at home, but the same company also offers a similar thing to yours, to print them in a book - I just don't have enough photos for a book right now  because i just started a few months ago.But once I have enough, I will put them in a nice book, with short descriptions for each photo and then maybe print several copies of the book to gift some of them to friends and family. Thank you for reminding me to put this on the TODO list  |
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I too have done some books with my photos. Sent one to my father a few years ago for fathers day and then did another one for myself. We also really like the digital photo frames available now. We have one that is connected to wifi and I can send photos to it straight from my phone. I send all of my astro photos there as well as a bunch of our family photos. It's nice to see them cycling through the day. My parents also have a digital photo frame I can email photos to. Another easy way to share photos with the family. I just email a photo to it and I'll get a text from them sometime later about how they saw a new photo appear.
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I’ve recently put a bunch of my Astro images into a large photo book to share with family and friends. I found that people really like it. It’s a great way to share the hobby and get all those great images off your hard drive and in places where people can see them (besides AstroBin of course). I used Blurb, but there are lots of other companies that do this. And it’s easy and amazingly cheap. This 80-page book cost $75 to print. The companies have free software you use to make the book. Could be great Christmas presents. I put text and descriptions in mine, but you don’t have to. A book of just your images would be nice. Try it. *** That looks awesome 😍 *** |
