Weddingbee

I’d heard about My Publisher on the Knot message boards, and filed it away for future reference — I’m always intrigued by new DIY and/or graphic design options! So when we got our DVD of full-resolution digital pictures from our photographer, I decided to give it a try.

My husband and I had decided that we wanted a “storybook” kind of wedding album. Our photographer has a really good eye for candid shots, which was one of the main reasons why we hired him. (The other reason being that he’s really, really, ridiculously good.) So we had a wealth of pictures to choose from in designing our page layouts.

MyPublisher comes with some standard page layouts, but to my aspiring graphic designer eye (read: anal-retentive), they were all pretty boring. So I followed the lead of others on the Knot and designed my own layouts in PowerPoint.

Two things to remember if you go the PowerPoint route:

• You must triple the slide size before beginning to insert pictures. For us, since we wanted the deluxe hardcover, which gives us pages that are 14.63 inches wide and 11.3 inches tall (according to the MyPublisher specs), that meant going into “Page Setup” in PowerPoint and changing the slide size to 43.89 inches wide by 33.9 inches tall. The technical reason for this is because PowerPoint exports .jpg files at 72 dpi (dots per inch), but the standard for good resolution printing is 200 dpi. Tripling the slide size takes care of this problem.
• You must have really high-resolution digital pictures. Our photographer gave us pictures that were 4368 x 2912 pixels. These were just barely big enough to be usable for full-bleed pictures (one large picture per page).

Once the slide size was set, I then designed our pages to my little heart’s content. Graphic design in PowerPoint is soooo easy — you might not have as many features and special effects as you get in PhotoShop, but honestly, those features kind of scare me. And (if I do say so myself), our page layouts turned out really well with just the simple functions available in PowerPoint. You’ve got your standard resizing and cropping, but you can also rotate pictures in 1-degree increments, add text over pictures, create a “watermark” look (by drawing a rectangle and filling it with gray, and tinkering with the transparency percentage), etc.

Each page in our album was its own slide. Once I was done with the whole thing, I saved each slide individually as a .jpg — go to “Save as,” and in the dropdown list next to “Save as type,” choose JPEG. You can try saving the whole thing all at once by clicking the “every slide” button in the window that pops up after you hit “save,” but this made my computer crash, since the file size was so huge — huge resolution plus huge picture files plus “every slide” equals unhappy laptop. Which reminds me — save your work as often as you can!

I then uploaded each .jpg file into the MyPublisher software, made whatever spacing adjustments were necessary, and voila! Within ONE WEEK, we had our wedding albums! MyPublisher is based somewhere in NY state, so we actually received our albums the day they sent us the email saying that they had shipped them out.

The one teeny, tiny little thing I wished I’d done was to account for the binding margin a little bit better. Clearance of about 1/8″ would have helped, I think. But nothing important in our album is cut off at the binding. And the albums are sooo beautiful! High-quality paper, great printing, beautiful binding… I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

I’ve included a picture of the cover (with ivory linen binding), and some representative layouts — the title page, pages with a “watermarked” picture in the background, full-bleed pictures, text overlays, and “frames” of varying transparency placed on a full-bleed picture.

You can view all the .jpg page layouts of our album, on my knot profile stinasim.

Christina