Recently, I had 2 photo books printed up at Blurb and they turned out great!  Paper and print quality were great. Price was reasonable.  And Lightroom 4’s Book Module that directly uploads to Blurb made it super simple.  LR has a number of built in templates for a photobook, but for our recent France vacation I wanted more flexibility in putting it together. 

Blurb has a plug-in for Adobe InDesign which creates the templates for you and then allows you to upload the finished book to their site to order. Easy, right? Except I’ve never used InDesign.  So, with the help of Lynda I’m learning the program while organizing the text and photos that will be part of the book.

I carried around a small Moleskine notebook and jotted down notes throughout the trip. I told JJ that I intended to add more story to our photobooks and that I needed his help. He was all for it, grabbing the book at times and adding his own observations and thoughts.  Its great, however he has horrible handwriting so there’s going to be a lot of follow up questions I’ll have for him! I’m glad we did this, because now I’ve got a lot of prompts to help with the writing.

As far as photo organization? *sigh* I take a lot of photos.  I thought for awhile how I’d approach this. I took 1200+ photos using 3 different cameras – my big d700, my little point and shoot and my iPhone. I put JJ in charge of the P&S – I’m hardly ever in any photos because I’m usually the one behind the lens. Giving him his own camera helped with including me in the photos though I did have to give him a crash course in composition. For example, he had the Eiffel Tower growing out of my head. I told him that did not make a good photo. He now gets it *smile*

It took two episodes of Fringe and a very large glass of wine to get the good ones picked out and ranked in my LR library.  There is no integration between LR and InDesign, which makes sense to me, but I won’t go into explaining here.  Knowing that I’m going to have to export the photos jpgs or tiffs before adding it to the layouts I decided to process the photos in small batches.  I plan to build the pages a spread at a time.  This might be the way most people do it, but I probably would have edited all the photos in one sitting and then throw them onto the pages.  And then hope for the best. 

So, right now, I’m about halfway through Day 1.  I’ve been using more and more of the Develop module in LR and getting a bit creative and more courageous with my editing.  Here’s an example, a before and after.  I primarily used split toning to achieve this effect.

This book is going to be amazing. I just know it.

Stay tuned for more updates and sneak peeks.