Photo Book Service

[brobbins]

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Hello,

I would like to have a book printed for personal use that includes photos I have taken during the pandemic. The last service I used was Blurb, but that was about 7 years ago. What book printing services would you recommend? The feature I care most about is high quality photo printing.

Thanks in advance for your recommendations.

[pippy]

Funnily enough I was hoping to find dozens of helpful replies and recommendations as I've just had a one-off photo book published and it was very much a case of the Curate's Egg;

"Really! - er - Some parts of it are very good!"...

Mine was a Blurb project and, on the whole, it is an impressive-looking volume; circa 120 pages, 13" x 11" hard-back with dust-jacket and printed with all the top options available selected. There are, however, two very distinct and very noticeable, fatal flaws.

The first is that despite 95% of the photographs (one per page) being rendered as pure monochrome files (the others were duotone / tri-tone / quad-tone) the 4-colour process used for the book has resulted in a gently and randomly variegated tri-tone effect where ALL black and white images are seen, in different areas, in different - quite subtle - tints and tones of magenta, cyan and black. The effect isn't wholly unpleasant - in some cases it adds a....well; shall we say different?...character to the image as originally imagined. NOT what was asked nor expected, though, and I'd rather my b'n'w images were printed B'n'W thank you very much.

The second is altogether more weird and far harder to describe but I'll give it a go; on certain areas of a number of images there is a shadow - a 'ghost' - of another image sort-of superimposed on the first. Think about it like this; You are in a darkroom making a traditional wet-print. You expose your sheet of paper in a printing-frame at the base of an enlarger normally with the image captured in negative #1. Then, before you develop the paper, you put the exposed in another printing-frame at another enlarger and give it perhaps 2% exposure-time with image/negative #2. You then dev/stop/fix/wash/dry print and find the very slight double-exposure from the second neg all-but-invisible but, at the same time, THERE all the same.

I've been trying to work out how this situation could possibly arise. All I can come up with off the top of my head is that somehow there is a situation arising where a printed page stacked on top of another printed page under a strong light-source is acting as a 'negative' and the paper directly underneath is behaving in some weird sort-of 'printing-out-paper' manner. Just to be absolutely clear; the 'ghost' image is never reversed so there isn't any issue with possible face-to-face (paper) ink print-off situation happening. The 'ghost' image is always seen as a negative in that light is dark and dark is light. The two images concerned are almost always either next to each other in the page-numbering sequence or, at most, one more page apart.

HAVING SAID ALL THAT; the book itself is quite impressive and the feeling is of a high-quality product. I will be having further copies printed once my collating / layout / text ideas have been finalised but before entrusting the project to Blurb I will be sending them such feedback as mentioned here and, depending on what they say, either go with them or else take it somewhere else.

In the meantime I will wait to see whether anyone else has a suggestion as to who might be a better option in the first place.

Philip.

Edited November 23, 2020 by pippy

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[Braaamer]

Blurb is printing on CMYK presses with AM screening - Color plane calibration is key to keeping BW images BW, but colour casts will always be difficult to avoid completely. And the ghost images sound to me like the press wasn’t well maintained in that regard either.  
 

Photobooks using a true BW printing mode with different levels of photo grey are very, very difficult to get. If you are willing to spend some money, call F.E. Burman close to Tower Bridge. They can print a true BW book on the most beautiful range of papers you can imagine.  

[P1505]

I won’t be using Blurb I hear nothing but bad.

I assume you’ll get a re print for free?

[pedaes]

28 minutes ago, P1505 said:

I won’t be using Blurb I hear nothing but bad.

I have been happy with Blurb and the LUF (forum) book organised by Andy turned out very well

7 inch square softback : 10 x 8 inch hardback : 12 inch square hardback and PDF versions

£10 from each sale will go to the Worldwide Cancer Research charity

[LocalHero1953]

I have had half a dozen or more photobooks from blurb, but from no one else. Only one was B&W and that was quite small and thin, but it was OK. I have no complaints either, but I've heard of others with B&W problems like @pippy's.

[Braaamer]

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I guess it’s a question of what one is after. Pretty much all „off-the-shelf“ photobooks are being printed on CMYK presses - dry toner, inkjet production presses or Indigo. All of these processes require CMY and cannot BW using only the black process ink. Grey neutrality of all these processes depends actually not only on the press being meticulously calibrated but also color profiling and - very important - avoidance of any automatic image enhancement when you submit your image data in RGB colour space as such enhancements will kick your BW images off the L axis in the Lab colour space. 
 

Indigo can use a special printing mode with two hits of black applied at different screen angles and with different gradation curves plus a light light black, ie photo grey, which yields stunning results on photo paper like substrates but also coated or uncoated stocks. Unfortunately, it is only specialized general commercial printers, not the typical photo finishers, that offer this special printing service. 

[pippy]

45 minutes ago, LocalHero1953 said:

I have had half a dozen or more photobooks from blurb, but from no one else. Only one was B&W and that was quite small and thin, but it was OK. I have no complaints either, but I've heard of others with B&W problems like @pippy's.

Just as a bit of an update.

After the bit-of-a-disappointing result I nevertheless ordered three further copies (after a hasty re-think of a few things!) and these turned out to be absolutely perfect in every way - so much so that I ordered even more copies. These, also, were perfect.

Threre was no repeat of any of the issues contained in the first volume as described earlier with either of these later runs. I have absolutely no idea as to why there were problems initially nor why these initial problems didn't resurface later but had I received a 'good' copy first-off I would have been singing Blurb's praises and, no doubt, curious as to why some people were complaining about the quality of the books they had received.

Philip.

Edited February 1, 2021 by pippy