Rakesh Agrawal’s Blog

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.

So even though I’m looking for more (I’m always looking for more!), I love the Blurb service and I’m pretty sure that I’m going to be using it *alot*.