talkmagic.co.uk

For my girlfriends birthday, I intend getting a little book made with her Facebook updates from the last year (she's a bit of a fb fan but there's only 126 entries) and was wondering if lulu was suitable?

I'm pretty good with photoshop so could design the jpegs but was wondering if someone could talk me through the process as it seems to have been used for lots of magic e books and books.

Thanks for any help

I publish using Lulu and will be glad to help if you need it. You can make a photo book.

Thanks, is it simple as preparing the images and uploading them to the site?

Sent you a PM

Relish wrote:I'm pretty good with photoshop so could design the jpegs

Please please please don't use JPG

Would PDFs be better?

Sometimes. Check with your printer, each one have their own requirements. I've never used Lulu before, but I assume a good old Word or LaTeX file will do the trick, assuming imagery is of sufficient quality

kolm wrote:Sometimes. Check with your printer, each one have their own requirements. I've never used Lulu before, but I assume a good old Word or LaTeX file will do the trick, assuming imagery is of sufficient quality

With all due respect, why on earth are you offering Relish advice about a service you've never used? Jpegs are fine. If you layout everything in something like openoffice.org and insert your .jpgs into that document (and then lay them out in whatever fashion you choose) - and then use its in built PDF creator. Upload that to your project and you are done.

Two things - download the template that they offer when you start the project (look for the hyperlink), and secondly, if you are printing in black and white - do not insert colour photos into your template. You can use something as simple as Windows Photo Gallery > Fix and mess with the brightness, contrast and saturation to make them black and white.

If you insert colour ones, its pot luck how they will turn out.

Duplicity wrote:

kolm wrote:Sometimes. Check with your printer, each one have their own requirements. I've never used Lulu before, but I assume a good old Word or LaTeX file will do the trick, assuming imagery is of sufficient quality

With all due respect, why on earth are you offering Relish advice about a service you've never used? Jpegs are fine. If you layout everything in something like openoffice.org and insert your .jpgs into that document (and then lay them out in whatever fashion you choose) - and then use its in built PDF creator. Upload that to your project and you are done.

JPG uses a lossy compression algorithm, which is not suitable for text. It compresses in such a way that it will look fine (although still with less data from the original) with photography, but with text and any image with sharp and distinct edges it will cause jpg artefacts, which look unsightly at the best of times, but will look even worse on high resolution print

JPG is also a raster image format, which only has a given resolution. What looks fine on your 72dpi screen won't look as good on a 300dpi professional print. The solution to that if you are creating a book (largely text) is to use a vector file format. Fonts are vector, so it makes sense to make use of this rather than turn the font into a raster format in photoshop

PDF is (usually) a vector format, which is why it's a good choice. However not all printers accept them and prefer to work with raw files, which is why it's best talking to your printer or checking out their documentation

Either way, JPG is a bad choice for typographical print design

I was assuming he was going to cut 'n paste all the relevant text(s) into something like Notepad and then paste that into the template. Adding suitable images as he went along. An entire book of screen shots then i would agree with you.

one used to be able to specify the compression for JPG perhaps

I dunno how many copies you are intending to circulate but if its just one or two then wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to print them off yourself and send them to a bookbinder?