I’ve only used printing services, but I’ve been curious about the process at home. It seems that there are a few different skills required. First, designing the album in a software like InDesign. Next, printing images on a specific paper. Then pages need to be assembled and bound. I’m guessing that this last step is best left to a professional book binder. It seems that the learning curve is steep and I suspect that few have gone this route. Can anyone provide a step by step approach that has worked for you?
My answer is clear. Nobody makes their own albums. At least nobody made their own albums and found the process useful enough to pass on
I just received an Epson 8550 dye/pigment hybrid printer as a replacement for my two dead Canon Pro-1000 printers. I’m pleasantly surprised with the prints and delighted with the low price of the inks. I expected this thread result and will probably print to 81/2”X11” and use a spray to protect the prints given that they will be, most likely, handled without care. Rather than make albums, I’ll organize prints in boxes.
Not exactly what you are looking for, but Itoya Profolios are available in many sizes. Clear, top loading sheets, with a black paper insert. Supposedly archival.
If your images are approximately the same size as the pages, simply drop one on each side of the insert. Alternately, you can remove the insert, and mount smaller images on each side by method of your choice. Clear corner squares are my pick.
While you don't get to see the surface of the prints directly, this method keeps dirty fingers off of your images, and displays them in a manor suitable for easy review.
Taperwing wrote:
Not exactly what you are looking for, but Itoya Profolios are available in many sizes. Clear, top loading sheets, with a black paper insert. Supposedly archival.
If your images are approximately the same size as the pages, simply drop one on each side of the insert. Alternately, you can remove the insert, and mount smaller images on each side by method of your choice. Clear corner squares are my pick.
While you don't get to see the surface of the prints directly, this method keeps dirty fingers off of your images, and displays them in a manor suitable for easy review. ...Show more →
I find the plastic sheets very distracting. I have a couple itoya portfolios and am not impressed with the presentation. I turned to making books or just leaving the prints to be viewed out of archival boxes.
chez wrote:
I find the plastic sheets very distracting. I have a couple itoya portfolios and am not impressed with the presentation. I turned to making books or just leaving the prints to be viewed out of archival boxes.
Agreed, I have a dozen Itoya Portfolios from small to 13”x19” and other than having images in one place, not much to be said for this storage approach.
I certainly don't disagree about being less than ideal. For me, it is simply a safe place to keep images, where they can be safely reviewed. I need to live with my images for a bit, before deciding if they are worthy of framing, or further presentation.
I just saw this!
Last year I started doing a photo project for a historical building that my apartment is part of in Copenhagen, where I decided to make a photo book & pass it on to the building.
I decided to do the whole process myself, since I own a Canon Pro, but had no good understanding of InDesign & bookbinding.
Learning InDesign & especially book binding felt a little like a detour in the beginning, but since you own a printer as well, I highly recommend it, as they both open doors to a lot more creative stuff.
I started small on bookbinding, creating notebooks with cheap print paper, as I wasn't willing to pierce/stitch/glue on expensive photo paper
I sourced everything I needed from https://www.richter-menzel.de/en/Bookbinding/Bookbinding/.
What you might want that will save you a ton of time/frustration depending on the format of your album is a rolling trimmer/guillotine. There, have a look at Dahle, they have some nice models, I own the 554.
There is ton of free material on YouTube on bookbinding, but I started with this as French stitching & hardcover was my desired format:
?si=V3XBHt2W0DKZbkxS
Depending on your hand skills & patience, I would say that you can produce excellent results after a couple of hours
I've been making books using a process called tape binding. Check out treacyphoto on Instagram or take a look at his website: treacyphoto.com
Mine don't look as good as his but I'm pretty happy with the results. Mine aren't sellable but I'd have no problem giving them to friends and family as gifts.
I've done this, although not with photobooks (just text and calligraphy). Hopefully I can do a photobook soon, if I can find a place to do double-sided photo printing...
Supplies are pretty easy to find at art supply stores (my local Blick had everything I needed).
For a sewn book (which the instructions above describe), you'll be folding all the sheets of paper along the long edge, with the crease parallel to the short edge, so each page will be half the size of your sheet (actually a little under, since there will be a little cutting/trimming involved later in the process). You'll want "short-grain" paper that folds more easily along the direction of the book's spine. Red River has two types of double-sided photo paper that fit this criteria: UltraPro SemiGloss Duo 255 and Polar Matte 230 (you'll want to get the "GS" sizes). I haven't found any other double-sided photo papers; if you do, please let me know.
I can't speak much about page layout and design for photobooks, but I will mention that Affinity Publisher is now free, and more than powerful enough for hobbyists. I mostly used TeX, which is great for text books but definitely not well-suited for graphics.
Once you have a PDF where each page is equal to the size of a *page* of your final book (i.e. half of the size of the physical sheet), you'll need to print "signatures" from them. Each signature is a thin booklet comprised of a few sheets folded together (you'll sew the signatures into a full book). For thick photo paper you won't want the number of sheets to be too high - probably 2 sheets/4 pages max - experiment to see how thick of a stack you can fold and crease first. I do this with the following TeX (put it in the same directory as your pdf, and just run pdftex on it):
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{geometry}
% this is the size of your SHEET, i.e. twice the size of your page
\geometry{papersize={11in,17in}, landscape, margin=0pt}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
%signature number here is number of PAGES per signature (half the number of sheets0
\includepdf[pages=-, signature=4]{rawbook-nosignatures.pdf}
\end{document}
You'll get an output PDF that you can feed into the printer. Given that photo printers tend not to have duplex units, you'll probably have to use manual duplex mode and be careful to feed the printer in the right direction.
From here it's just folding, sewing, and trimming, like in the tutorial.
