User Guide
How to create a photo book
Double-click the Photo Books desktop shortcut.
A Welcome dialog will come up. Click Create New Book. Select ‘Easy Photo Book Wizard’ to fast track your project. Now, choose a size for your photo book (eg A4 portrait, or A4 landscape, other options are available). NOTE: Most of our photo books come with a standard minimum of 20 pages, and a maximum of 120 pages. Some however have different specifications, please check product details for further information.
You should now see the Pixme workspace. Use the Image Browser at the bottom of the workspace to load pictures to use for your photo book.To do so: Click the Add Picture or Add Folder (of pictures) icon at the left of the Image Browser. You can then drag & drop pictures directly from the Image Browser and onto your photo book pages.
If you are using layouts or templates, you can use the Distribute Pictures command (under the Layout menu) to automatically distribute your pictures amongst the pages. Toggle between the various page display options seen as tabs on the Image Browser.
Page Layouts – preset arrangements of picture-ready picture frames. Once applied to a page, you can rearrange the layout elements any way you choose.
Page Backgrounds – various colors, textures, and designs you can apply to your pages.
Picture Borders – borders of various color and thickness you can apply to pictures.
Templates – themes that can be applied to your entire photo book. Once applied to a page, you can rearrange the template elements any way you choose.
All of these items can be dragged & dropped directly onto a page (or frame, as the case may be).
When you have finished designing your photo book, click the Send To PIXME button to upload your project to our production facilities.
Photobook Tips
Image Resolution
Picture resolution is important to achieve the best possible printed product. You should always aim for 300dpi. Once you have placed the picture, run your cursor over the image and you will notice a resolution readout at the foot of the window and as you adjust the size of the image this reading will change,
ie. less when the picture is enlarged and more when the picture is reduced.
Additional Features
The following features can be used by selecting an image with the cursor and then right clicking to access a pop down menu with many options, eg the following;
•Adjusting & cropping your pictures
• Black & white and sepia filters, fading
• Aligning and rotating pictures
• Removing & duplicating frames/pictures
• Adding a drop shadow
• Perfectly clear picture option
• Adding captions
Using iPhoto Images on an Apple Mac
Currently our software does not recognise imahes within iPhoto. Please copy images that you wish to use into a seperate new folder.
Designing pages in Adobe Photoshop®
If you plan to design some or all of your pages in Adobe Photoshop®, there are a few more things you need to know: Images should be saved as .jpg with the colour space as rgb (do not use cmyk colour space) at 300dpi. Bleed is when one or more sides of a printed image touch the edge of the paper. The use of bleed guarantees that the finished (cropped) page will look neat & precise. The page bleed allowance should be 3mm at all four sides of the page. The bleed area (i.e. beyond the crop marks) will be trimmed off. If you use a background color or image, it should fill the entire page including the bleed area. For example, if your printed page size is 210mm wide, your page design should be 216mm wide with the bleed (3mm + 210mm + 3mm).
2 Page Spreads span both right & left-hand pages. The pages are centered at the gutter where they are bound into the spine. Approximately 6mm of the spread will be bound into (and thus hidden within) the spine. This, in of itself, is not a problem, but it does require a bit of special attention when using an external tool, such as Adobe Photoshop to create your page designs.
Keep important design details at least 10mm from all sides of the page (15mm is even better) so that unwelcome trimming does not occur. Keep important design details an extra 10mm away from the center binding (this is in addition to the bleed you leave on all 4 sides of the page). This is an issue specifically for single page designs.
The software will adjust the spread pages for the 6mm lost within the spine. Please keep in mind that although page spreads are well suited for panoramic picture backgrounds, fine details may be partially obscured within the binding.
