yesterday i received the printed version of my sofobomo book from print. i had been really curious about the quality, especially the rendering of the difficult, so i thought, darker regions. in this respect there is hardly a fault to find. problems however arise in two other aspects: colors, especially red and blue, come out definitely more vivid than on my calibrated monitor, and fine structures like sand on the beach or a fishing net suffer from the printing resolution. sometimes even in fine nuanced bright areas it seems that compression artifacts become visible. now i stop nitpicking, because i know only too well that i can definitely not expect steidl quality for a print-on-demand book in that price class. we always get what we pay for.
the positive experience of the first self-made book, where i did not resort to the pre-fabricated layouts of photobook making software, is simply unbeatable. and in this sense i have learned a lot in this year’s sofobomo, and i guess i’ll be in next year again. the image above was taken on the beach of batticaloa and is the back title of my book.
You might find this interesting: http://www.daveblackphotography.com/workshop/06-2009.htm
Anil, thanks for pointing this out. In fact I used the blurb software, but only their full bleed option with the pages created by myself in scribus and exported as 300dpi jpgs. I guess I will try a 2nd copy and before that carefully triple check all settings.
Post Scriptum: The reason for using scribus and dismissing the blurb layout options of course is the necessity to create a plain pdf file. Obviously blurb fears that their software might be (ab)used for this purpose and does not offer this option.