I just discovered Blurb and I’m thrilled about trying it out. As someone who’s experimented with online printing services like Qoop, I think I’m going to like Blurb.
FEEDBACK:
(as I go through their client software (“BookSmart”) I’m going to post feedback that I have, as I have it)
- There’s a part of the wizard where it asks me to choose a theme/style. And it shows me these thumbnails… I want to be able to zoom in and see these styles up close and in detail.
- More style options wouldn’t hurt.
- The open file dialogs are custom-built, not the standard windows ones… so they don’t behave in standard ways. Like I’m looking at a list of photos in a particular folder and I want to sort them by date. It won’t let me do that (though the view I’m using does look just like the ‘detail’ view of the standard windows dialog)
- At a high level, I like the interface of the application once you get out of the wizard… the zoom is nice and fast, moving between pages is fast, the quality of the previews/wysiwyg is nice
- The autoflow feature (where you point it at a bunch of your photographs and it creates a layout for you) is ‘a few croutons short of a salad’. It incorrectly cropped a lot of my photographs (and I’m not sure how easy it would be to be more intelligent about cropping, I’d assume it’s not easy) and it when you go to change layouts, it could smarter. For example, I switched to a 4 photo layout on a page that it automatically chose a 9 photo layout for. Rather than “reflowing” the 5 photographs that got left out in my switch from 9 to 4, it just dropped those 5 photos. And what’s worse, when I reverted back to the 9 photo layout, I had lost those 5 photographs that were left out in the switch altogether (ie I had a layout with 9 spots of which only 4 had photographs in them).
[...] I wrote about my initial discovery of Blurb a week and a half ago. Shortly after I wrote that post, I spent 30 minutes with Blurb’s BookSmart software putting together an album of one of the events from my sister’s wedding. The process of putting the album together was pretty painless and the software exceeded my expectations. Earlier this week, less than week after I placed my order, I received my first Blurb book. Pretty impressive! The hardback book that I had ordered had a beautiful glossy sleeve on it and inside was a well bound book with high quality paper and printing. The quality of photo prints was well beyond the typical dithered fare I’ve seen from vendors like Ofoto and Shutterfly and Qoop. My Blurb book didn’t have the depth to them of printed photographs found in expensive coffee table books, but I was pretty happy and several others I showed the book to were impressed with the photo quality (including our designer at SnapStream, Joel — and he worked in print for a couple of years so his opinion was more than of a layperson). I think I have two wishlist items after going through the full cycle with Blurb once. 1) I want to be able to make larger books — 8×10 just doesn’t satisfy me and 2) I wish Blurb did something for color correction. For color correction, in my Blurb book, I had too many photographs that came out dark. They looked fine on my screen, but printed, they looked dark. So now that I know to pay closer attention to this, I think I’ll be OK, but I’ll still have to specially light correct for my Blurb books in Picasa (what I use to manage my photographs), export those photographs (quite a chore considering my first project is going to involve choosing from the 8,000+ photographs taken at my sister’s wedding), and then import them into BookSmart. [...]
Pingback by Rakesh Agrawal’s Blog » More about Blurb — January 27, 2007 @ 4:44 am