iPhoto Photo book

[anxela]

I've made some photo books in iPhoto that I'm going to give away for Christmas. Searching the web for information on them, I saw that the books tend to print a little dark. I was wondering if anyone here has ordered these books, and you do to get around this?

Will adjusting the exposure slider within iphoto be a good solution or would you edit the exposure in lightroom/ photoshop? And do you have a "rule" for adjusting; e.g adjust 0.5 step or something?

Thanks for helping, fellow Mac-users! :-)

[readstoomuch]

Wish that I could help you with this one . . . but I don't have iPhoto. Someone "in the know" will come to your rescue soon I'm sure!

[echogirl]

Hi Anxela,

I'm not going to be much help. I made a photobook with iPhoto about 3 years ago and I did find that the book was a bit on the dark side. At the time, Apple said to look at my images in PDF form to determine if they were too dark or light and they refunded my money. I really did not understand what they wanted me to do. Since then I found Photoshop and have made the rest of my books at Shutterfly and I haven't had a problem since.

I do know the company that Apple used to print their book is My Publisher so maybe check if they have a forum or thread about this issue.
Good Luck

[Britgirl]

I have never made their book, but have made their calendars and they came out lovely so thats no help at all is it? LOL sorry. the quality was excellent this year, improved on what I thought was fine quality two years ago!

[anxela]

I can help you with the preview as pdf! What you're supposed to do is right-click (ctrl-click) somewhere around your book. Then there's an option "Preview book". It will assemble the book to show you how it will look in print. But I didn't know that this will give me an idea of how light or dark the prints are. :-) I can't notice a difference in the "exposure" in the preview compared to the iphoto original version.

When you right-click, there's also an option to save the whole book as pdf (great if you want to e-mail it to friends or family).

Thanks Britgirl!

It's nice to know that you got a great result, and that the quality is improved! Maybe I'll just give it a shot. I've heard from several that the give a refund if you're not happy, so I suppose I have nothing to lose (except time).

Thanks echogirl for letting me know about My Publisher, will check it out!

[davidjschloss]

It's not that the books tend to print dark, but actually two other issues.

1) Most people send jobs to print from the iPhoto book tools without calibrating their monitors. Most people have their monitors set with the brightness all the way up, which is one of the things that's adjusted when you calibrate your monitor.

2) The color range or "gamut" of the commercial printers that make the books and calendars and such isn't as wide as that of photo printers in general, so colors that would otherwise have some level of detail go right to black. That tends to pull down the tone of the image and make it look darker.

3) Printer profiles for the commercial printers used by iPhoto aren't available anywhere so you can't convert the profile first to see how it would look as a soft proof, makes it hard to adjust.

If you've already got your images in iPhoto and want to adjust them a bit before sending them (which is a great idea) there's no reason to round trip them through LR/Aperture/Photoshop. You've already got an image editing program and an exposure adjustment in iphoto will do the trick.

[anxela]

Thanks for your information David! It was very helpful!

I have a calibrated external monitor (calibrated with Spyder3Pro), and the photo book does show up somewhat darker on that one, so I think the smartest thing to do is manage my photo books on that monitor. But I'm a bit puzzled about the calibration, because when I calibrate my macbook pro, it doesn't adjust the brightness as much as on my external monitor... Strange..? Or am I doing something wrong?

[kdif]

Great info David. Can you (or anyone else) explain how we are suppose to use printer profiles to check our layouts. For e.g. I have the profile for the Costco near me but I don't know how I am to use it. Is their something in PS that I can enter the profile to before I save the file?