Our Honeymoon In Paris: A Blurb Book Review
December 11th, 2007 @ 1:11 pm by Mrs. Bell Pepper
On our honeymoon in Paris, I took a ton of photos during our sightseeing adventures into the city of love. We wanted to create a large hardcover photo album of all the memories we captured during our honeymoon, so I created one through Blurb Books. They have an excellent holiday promotion going on - I got $10 off my very first book design!
The book looks so cute! I used one of our favorite photos of the Louvre for the cover. We arrived there just as the museum opened up - I love how serene the Louvre looks without the crowds of tourists. I designed the cover using Adobe Photoshop and added my own whimsical font to match the style of the photo album.
Here’s a close-up of the front cover. The font came out so clear and I love the faded design around the edges.
The book cost a little under $50 with shipping and I included about 160 pages of photos.
For the spine of the book I stretched the front cover photo all the way around so that you can see a slice of the Louvre.
Flipping through the book, the pages are pretty good in quality. I kind of wish the pages were thicker so that the book will last for a longer time. If you plan to create a large book that includes more than 100 pages, the hardcover version might be a better option than the softcover because the binding will be stronger and you’ll have less chances of the pages falling out.
And lastly, the back cover of the book. I added another favorite photo that reminds us of our bicycle cake topper. I wish the barcode wasn’t there because it kind of ruins the design and makes the photobook appear less personal.
The pros about using Blurb Book: The software is very easy to use and there are a large variety of photo design layouts that you can use throughout the book. Just drop the photos in the page layout and you’re done! It’s pretty simple to use and it’s very easy to upload to the website. The customer service is fairly good, and if you’re not happy with the quality you can always return the book to get a refund.
The cons about using Blurb Book: I kind of wish the pages were better in quality; a little thicker. I noticed the quality of the pages inside is about the same as My Publisher and Shutterfly’s photobooks. I made sure before ordering the book that all the photos were sharp and clear, and I noticed in the final products a few photos turned out blurred in comparison.
I guess overall I’m quite happy with the quality of the Blurb photobook. It’s great for the price you pay for the book and you have a lot of design layouts to choose from. I think I’ll consider trying other photobook companies, such as Lulu.com and PicaBoo.com for our future travel destinations. If anyone else has other photobook recommendations or would like to share experiences using Blurb, please feel free to comment!
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47 Responses to “Our Honeymoon In Paris: A Blurb Book Review”
That’s beautiful! We just got our wedding album that I made through iPhoto and the picture quality and paper quality is awesome– I couldn’t be happier (well, except for that $900 one from our photographer… I am still lusting after that).
Anyway, the quality is great, but it costs more than blurb: it was $78, with shipping (and you can’t combine shipping) for 56 pages for a hardcover book. But the pages are so large (i think it’s at least 10 x 14) that multiple pictures on a page come out very clearly.
This looks lovely. I’ve used Blurb before for smaller books and I really like it. I hope to do something similar to yours for the wedding and HM. What size is yours?
I think the size was about 8 x 11, not too large but I added a lot of pages!
Looks fantastic! i started a blurb project — a cookbook to give my mom for christmas — but ran out of time. I looks like the photo books would be a lot less time-intensive than something as text-heavy as a cookbook.
Looks great… i was considering Blurb for my wedding album…
i too would be interesting in finding other websites…keep me posted 
You are so talented! The front and back covers look so great!
wow..it looks professionally done!
I want to use blurb to write my own children’s book!
I love Viovio for photo books. The prices are unbeatable, hands down, and they have LOADS of sizes/covers/etc available. Moreso than just hard or soft cover, you can actually pick your type of binding. I’ve done price comparisons and at each size, it cheaper than Blurb, Shutterfly, etc. The only downside is that printing and shipping takes longer — two to three weeks, versus the 2 day turnaround service of other sites — but I think it’s certainly worth the wait it for the price and quality.
Your book looks beautiful! I just completed mini-albums of our wedding for Christmas gifts for our family members. I did them on Blurb and loved the software, except the designer in me always wanted to change small parts of the layouts. They should arrive on our doorstep next week, so I hope the quality is good. I was debating using Blurb for our main album as well, but I worry about it not standing up to the test of time. I just can’t splurge on the $1000 album from our photographer, even though they are beauuuuutiful! I look forward to hearing about more photobook sites!
looks awesome, mrs. bp! looks very professional. you have a keen eye for photography!
wow this is the first time i’ve left a comment since we launched comment icons. lol. i love seeing my icon!
Wow, that’s amazing!!! What a fabulous idea (not to mention a fabulous outcome). I was just on the Blurb website yesterday but have nothing to make into a book at the moment…. But I love your idea of a honeymoon book — may steal it when the time comes!
Oh my gosh I love your photo album!! FI and I are going to be in Paris for a few days on our honeymoon and your photo book makes me wish I was talented and creative like you! I only hope that I’m able to re-create something as beautiful as the photo album you created to cherish our memories of Paris for a lifetime! The cover truely is amazing!!
I’ve used LuLu and it turned out fantastic! And only for $20… but I might use this service just to see the difference. =)
The book looks beautiful!!!
I thought about using Lulu.com, how’s the quality Mrs. Caramel? I’m also thinking about trying Vivio and Picaboo in the future. Anyone had good experiences?
Mrs Bell Pepper, presuming that by Vivio you meant Viovio, I already commented above about how pleased I have been with the quality and customization of books.
Julie, I apologize! I remember your comment about Viovio but I was just distracted by call about a patient a few moments ago. I’m on-call right now and I shouldn’t be on weddingbee now.
Your book looks amazing Mrs. BP!! I love the front cover. What camera do you use?
Hi everyone.
I’d like to introduce another site into the discussion. I’m a marketing manager at Panraven (www.panraven.com), an online storytelling website that also enables you to print photobooks. You can see an example of a wedding story amongst the featured stories on our home page.
We provide specially designed templates for travel and wedding, as well as many others.
I think you will be impressed with the paper quality as well. Our pages are noticeably thicker than many competitors.
Another valuable aspect of Panraven is the ability to embed stories on any website(including blogs).
If you have any questions about our service, I’d be happy to answer them. You can reach me at:
Andy
Hi Junebride08,
Thanks for the compliment! I used a Nikon D40 for the photos, I recently upgraded to a Canon DSLR. Both cameras are great!
Looks great! I just uploaded my 276 page album about our honeymoon in Fiji.
Did you make your own templates or use the ones they provided? And did you soft proof the images? Just curious because I did both and I’m hoping the colors turn out. I’ve been reading the Blurb forums a lot and that’s what people recommend. I hope mine turns out as good as yours!
Just one thing to remember about paper thickness though: Increasing the thickness by just a few pounds will greatly increase the size that needs to be bound. One of the best features of Blurb is that you can get up to 440 pages. Imagine how thick that would be if the pages were thicker. It would be nice if they used thicker pages for thinner books but that feature hasn’t come along yet.
Fox & the Hound,
I actually used the provided templates.. what do you mean by soft proofing the images? I adjusted the colors on Photoshop and that’s about it. I used the colors provided for the fonts and background colors.
Hope this helps!
hi mrs. bell pepper - do you mind sharing how you were able to stretch the front cover picture around the spine? it looks great and i can’t figure out how to do this with their software.
thanks!
Hi Elizabeth,
I think looking back at the cover, I didn’t stretch the image to the spine. You can match the spine image to be like the cover by moving around the image. I think I added just a slice of the Louvre and it looks pretty good as part of the spine.
Elizabeth, I just took a your blog, I love your inspirational boards and your STD are so gorgeous! How did you create them?
thanks for your help on the photo book! i’ll try that. and thanks also for your sweet comment on my STDs. they were a TON of work! i basically used chipboard, bookbinding tape, fabric, lace, and my limited sewing skills. i also posted on creating the book lining that i used for the inside, here is the post:
http://www.elizabethannedesigns.com/blog/2007/11/29/a-tutorial-making-bookcloth/
Mrs. BP
Soft proofing is where you download the ICC color profile that the printer uses and view how your layout will be printed. The color on your monitor can be very different than the color that is printed. It’s talked about a lot on the blurb forums if your interested.
Sorry to get so technical. I’m just worried about the colors in our pictures looking good. It was so sunny that we have a lot of very intese colors in our pictures. Do you think the colors in your book look how you expected?
Thanks!
Mrs. Bell Pepper: Did you use your own font in Photoshop to create your cover, or did you use their font feature and use your own font? (Does that make sense to you?) I created a page myself w/ a lot of text in AI, and it ended up not coming out “smooth.” The text that I typed in using the Blurb templates came out very nicely.
Fox&theHound: I think I soft proofed correctly, but I might not have…either way, the text issue I mentioned above did not show on my soft proof. Also, I had a 100% Magenta element that came out completely the wrong color (a weird purple) in the final product, but not in my soft proof. Again, I’m not sure if I did my soft proof correctly. The pro photos came out wonderfully as far as color, so I think it was something w/ me and my design element…
Princesskitty
Soft proofing deals with colors only. It wouldn’t show you text looks like. Also, to correctly soft proof you have to have your monitor calibrated. So that may have been the problem.
By AI do you mean Adobe Illustrator? Did you save it as jpeg at maxium resolution? Text can be a really hard to get to be smooth. That’s one of my other worries about my book.
I’ll have to post pictures of my book on the boards. If it turns out good I can explain what I did. If it turns out bad, people can learn from my mistakes.
Hi F&H — Yep — Illustrator. I turned the text into outlines and then saved as a JPEG…which normally works when I do things like VistaPrint postcards and ads for magazines…but peculiarly, it didn’t work on my Blurb book. The only explanation I could come up w/ is that I usually submit those types of things as PDFs, and for Blurb, they had to be JPEGs.
That would be really great if you could post examples!
Hmmm…I would have thought that would have worked. Maybe it’s the way jpegs are interpolated. There are a lot of people on the blurb forums that would like to have blurb accept pdf’s because there are so many less problems with using them.
I’ll have to post examples when I get the book (currently scheduled to get it on the 21st).
Are you a graphic designer? Just curious, not a lot of people understand the technical side of printing. I’m not in the printing business I’m a mechanical engineer who likes to exercise the other half of my brain. So I enjoy learning the technical stuff.
Hi F&H — you’d think, yeah? Sooooo frustrating! Even my graphic designer co-worker friend was mystified.
I’m not a professional designer; I just like to “putter.” I self taught myself AI and PS, but I have really old versions, so I’m totally not up to speed on the latest cool stuff, and I’m really at just a baby beginner level. I hope to learn more soon b/c we are buying ourselves a new computer as a Christmas present, and I’m treating myself to CS3! Woo-hoo!
I am, though, in the publishing industry, so that’s mostly why I understand quite a bit of the technical aspects, even if I don’t know how it all works.
What an absolutely gorgeous book! That is definitely one that will be a keepsake for many years to come. Back in the summer, Mrs. Plumeria blogged about a photobook creation site called Mixbook.com (http://www.weddingbee.com/2007/07/18/an-idea-for-the-hive/). I know I’m biased because my husband’s the cofounder and CEO, but I think it’s a great site for quality, affordable photobooks! We’ve put together a few different photobooks of our wedding, highlighting different things, telling different stories — all because it’s so versatile and affordable to print too! The cool thing is that it’s collaborative — so you could have all your wedding guests upload their pictures of the wedding to one book, make their own pages, and be able to have a cool compilation of all those awesome candids that often disappear into computer-hard-drive land! I KNOW there were tons of cameras at our wedding and I want to be able to see the pictures everyone took! Give it a try http://www.mixbook.com and let me know what you think!
Hi Mrs. Bell Pepper, I am getting married in Honey Brook, PA. I recently came across your picture in the photos of David zalofff.. can you give me recommendations or any feedback on his photography skills. I am thinking about hiring him… Also I love your candy buffet look do you mind send me some information on that. thank you.
Diana
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I love your book!! How did you stretch the cover into the spine? I have been trying - but no luck!
I also just made a book with Blurb. I wanted to try a small softcover project to test their quality before I put tons of hours into something. I must say I was soooooooo disappointed! I chose to not make my pages in Photoshop, but do them directly in their program to see the “virgin” quality. My images are from a 10MP DSLR with each photo being about 2-3 MB each, so the input quality was fine. Their output was dark, grainy, oversaturated photos. I was floored. I’ve heard such glowing reviews that I couldn’t believe it. I contacted Blurb and they offered to remake the book for me, indicating that they can only keep prices so low by not recalibrating the printer after each book. They figured mine was one of the 3% of books that were toward the end of the run. So, they sent me another book and it was the same. What a disappointment.
The main company I use is Creative Memories for my photobooks since the quality is superb and the pages are sewn, not glued to the spine. The Storybook Creator software is easy and scrapbook papers and elements are beautiful. I haven’t seen that in any other company. Most of the companies are within a few dollars of CM, except for Blurb and Viovio (still waiting for the Viovio album to arrive.)
I have a full Excel spreadsheet comparing companies if anyone wants.
I’ve made 3 gift books from MyPublisher (I got 2 for free–good promo!) where I inserted my Creative Memories Storybook Creator layouts into full bleed pages and they came out beautifully. Since they are in my state, I received them 2 days after placing the order. That was nice!
So, now I guess I wait to see how the VioVio book comes out for a less expensive alternative for gifts and such.
Update on Blurb and VioVio
Just received viovio photobook-softcover-20 pages. The cover is glossy and beautiful. BUT 2 small white spots and obvious posterization on one of the faces. Interior pages are not impressive. Lots of posterization making the faces look kind of dirty. Also some yellowish tinge on the faces on a page with a pale yellow background. Ugh. Side by side comparison with the MyPublisher book (same images) and the color is much better with MyPublisher.
Blurb is raising their prices tomorrow. This is the new rate table http://blurberatiblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/pricesheet_normal_0805_justtable.pdf
Looks like you get what you pay for. (not considering iPhoto–I’m on a pc) I guess I’m sticking with Creative Memories for quality and ease since they are priced similarly to all the well known companies.
Hope this helps someone!
We ordered a photo-guestbook for our wedding using Blurb. We had a horrible experience with their customer service. They do not have any phone support and I found their e-mail support to be lacking. We basically got the book on the day after our wedding. I e-mailed their customer support multiple times asking them to send the book for Saturday delivery (our wedding was on Sunday, we had paid overnight shipping and were willing to pay even more for the Saturday delivery) and got no help from them. The book tragically arrived on Monday, just a day too late for our wedding. We found the quality of the book to be ok but not great. The paper is thin and the cover had some bubbles on it but the image quality was good. I haven’t tried any other company yet so I can’t compare. I will be trying one of the others soon. I would not recommend using Blurb if you are in a rush — even paying overnight shipping we didn’t get the book in less than eight days.
Can anyone tell me how to transfer pics from photoshop into blurb booksmart?
Can anyone tell me how to transfer pics from photoshop into blurb booksmart?
I just developed my honeymoon pictures. While looking for a photo album i found this, i wish i would have sooner… 
Mrs. Bell Pepper, Philadelphia
Age and Occupation: 28, Resident Physician
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 30, Resident Physician
Engagement Date: May 30, 2006
Wedding Date: June 2007
Venue: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
About Me: I love whimsical details and design, everything that *sparkles*, sipping on hazelnut lattes, pugs, shopping for antiques and second-hand goods, scenic photography, delicate flowers, and checking out new restaurants in the city with my fianc??. We are planning our wedding at a unique city venue for about 75 close family members and friends. I have a lot of DIY ideas and I like to blog about ways to save money on your wedding.
The book cover is so lovely, very beautiful pictures from what I can see. It’s a great idea, thanks for sharing!!