When we started COUTURE BOOK, we did it because we were tired of the boring, stale board style albums that were out there.  We wanted present our images in books that were exactly like the style of modern fine-art coffee table books that we had by our favorite artists and photographers.  The process to build these books required a different style of printing and binding that wasn't currently available outside of really large printing runs.  Our goal was to make this style of book available as a one-off, custom made book that you could offer to all of your customers.  





The key to these books, however, is not just the physical process of printing and binding, but more importantly it's in the design process.   Grab any one of your coffee-table books, even better grab your favorite one by your favorite photographer (lately my favorite has been Annie Liebovitz - "A Photographer's Life 1990-2005").  When you sit down and look at them, take a hard look at the design and layouts.   They are usually very simple, and really focus on the images.  For instance in the Annie Liebovitz book there is never more than two images per page.  Even better, most pages are single images and panoramic images that span two pages.  This style of design allows your viewer to focus on each image individually.  The design is only there to help you linger and appreciate each image.  This is very different from the designs I commonly see in board albums, albums where you have a very limited amount of pages, where you have to have many images compete for space on each page.





While this is great in theory and it may sound simple, for me personally it's hard to create this style of design and give my images the most impact.   I like to focus on my photography and my customers, so I let my expert handle the design process. 

To help others with this, COUTURE BOOK offers custom design services by our graphic designer for $2.25 an image.  With the custom design process we will create a completely custom layout for your book based on your images and style.   To give you a better idea of some different designs that we've done, here's a link to a slide show of several different styles: CUSTOM DESIGNS





Although each book is unique, we try to start with a general idea of the styles you like, and then we build your unique layout from there.  Not only does it save you time and energy, but your clients can see your images in the best way possible.

Let us know if you are interested in a custom book design or have any questions on custom designs, and we'll be happy to help you create some AMAZING books of your photography!

-Dave

If you haven't seen it yet, you gotta check out our new Aperture 3.0 plug-in: http://www.CoutureBook.com/Aperture

We love Apple's new Aperture for the book design option.  It's just so easy to use, and once you create your first book each book afterward just gets easier and easier.  Aperture can save custom templates as you create them, making that next book that much faster to design.  Even if you use another program for your image editing, the design piece of Aperture makes it worth your while to check it out.  Here's the link to download the trial version: Aperture

Once you have installed Aperture and our plug-in, here's how to get started with a book design for COUTURE BOOK, and how export it to us when done:

First, select the image you want to use (highlight the images at the bottom or hold "Command A" to select all of them).  Then click on the "New" link at the top, and select book.



Second, this should open a new window with all of the book options available. 



Third, in the "Book Type" drop down window, you can choose COUTURE BOOK.  



Fourth, once you have book picked, you can then pick the size of book you want to design, and name your project.



After that, you'll go through and design your book layouts.  Keep in mind that the provided templates can all be adjusted and you can even make and save your own templates for future COUTURE BOOK project.



Lastly, when your book design is completed, just hit the "Send Book" link in the upper right to send the book to COUTURE BOOK.   This will then connect you to COUTURE BOOK, and will walk you through the ordering process.   You'll be able to pick out your book style and all of the options associated with that style. 



If you do choose a book with a designed cover layout or cover image, we'll follow up after you place your order with instructions on how to upload the cover image(s) separately.

Hope you like the new plug-in, and please let us know if you have any questions comments on it.

Happy Designing!!

-Dave

One of the first questions I get from photographers about our books is "How am I going to create layouts for so many pages?!?"

At first building a 100 page or 200 or even 300 page book may seem daunting, but I think you'll find that designing layouts for COUTURE BOOK ends up being much easier and faster than designing books for flush mount style albums.

The inspiration for creating our book collections comes from looking at the fine art coffee table books by our favorite artists.  The image layouts in these books are very simple and classic designs, designs that focuses on individual images rather than complicated layouts with multiple images.   For instance, in an Annie Leibovitz book I recently picked up, it's almost all full bleed images and double page spreads.  The images are amazing, and the layout focuses you on the images.   Because each page is a single image your attention in only on that page, making that image much more powerful.




With our books, we encourage that style of design.  We want you to take advantage of all of those pages.  We want you give your customers tons of images, and still have them look fantastic, and we want your customers to rave about your images and treat their book like the fine art heirloom it should be. 

Designing 100 pages in a flush mount style is daunting, but designing 100+ pages in a simple, classic style is EASY, and even better, it's much more flattering for your images.

With this in mind, we have three options for the book layouts:
1. Design using our online templates:   With this option, it keeps the layouts very simple.  The online design tool gives you a single image per page with different border options.  To check out this option, just head to the site and upload some images to a sample project.  That will let you preview the layout tool and see how easy it is to create a fine art style layout.

2. You can have our graphic designer create a custom layout for you:   With this option, you'll upload all of the images to our site, and our graphic designer will create a completely custom layout for you.  These layouts are custom tailored to your specifications, and focus on simplicity and your images.   You'll tell me what type of design style you like, how many double page spreads (or not), and we'll build the layouts based on your input.  



Here's a couple of links to custom layouts we've recently done:
http://couturebook.com/build/viewer.html?productId=100028087
http://couturebook.com/build/viewer.html?productId=100028577
http://couturebook.com/build/viewer.html?productId=100028197


For custom layouts, we recommend a minimum of 100 images (maximum of around 400).  Just upload your images to a new project and let me know when you have it ready.   We'll then follow up to get your book specifications and general style guidelines, and we'll get started on your custom design right away.

3. You can design your own custom layouts:   You can design your book with any program you like, just as long as you can export your final layouts as Jpeg files.  Create your layouts on canvases sized at the exact book size at 300 dpi (9x6 books should be sized at 8.5x6).   Once you have the blank canvas setup, start your layouts.  Again, we recommend keeping your layouts focused on the images.  Make them simple and clean with a lot of pano pages and full bleed pages. 

Also, don't be afraid to leave blank pages or blank space.  You have a ton of real-estate to work with and sometimes a blank page can really accent the image on the other page:




For more info on page specifications, check out this blog post: http://www.couturebook.com/blog/2008/07/03/PageLayoutFAQ.aspx

The other great thing about being able to offer this many pages, and keeping your design simple is it's much easier to offer more images to your customers in their books.  Instead of having to pick their favorite 30 or 40 images from the 1500 images you edited down to, they can almost pick as many as they want!   That eliminates one huge frustrating part of the design process.  No longer are you or your customers agonizing over which images they love best, and which ones they have to cut.  Instead you can include ALL of their favorites!

I get a lot of questions about the appropriate number of pages for a book, and my answer is that we strongly recommend a minimum of 70 pages, but most books tend to be around 150 pages.

I should probably first start out with a quick reminder that when we talk about pages, we mean the same thing as sides.  We count pages the way you would number pages in a book, so a book with a 150 pages, is the same as a 150 sides, or 75 double page spreads.

We have a two main reasons we recommend the larger page counts; first, the bigger the book the better they feel, and second, we want to encourage everyone to design more simply, to focus less on fitting your images to a 30 page layout, and focus more on a layout fits your images.

We designed the Couture Books to look and feel like the style of the fine art photography books you'd purchase of your favorite artist at the bookstore or museum store.   These books generally have a lot of images and a lot of pages.   We want your clients to be able to keep your book on their coffee table, next to their other art books, so it needs to have that heft.

Also with those fine art books, they tend to have a very simple layout, usually just a single image per page, and many times a full bleed image spanning the two pages.  When we do custom designed books, we generally average around 3/4 of an image a page, so with that 150 page book, we would on average have about 113 images.  This makes the design process much easier than if you were trying to pop those 113 images into a 60 page flush mount album, and I think the end result is much more flattering for your images.

With this in mind, I thought it would be helpful to show the sizes of the books with different page counts and compare them to a couple of fine art books so that you can get a better idea of the sizing.



I grabbed five books with a nice range of page counts from 40 pages all the way up to 300 pages.   The books shown here from top to bottom are: Italian Roma, French Paris, NY East Hampton's (without the slipcase), Earth Greenland, and French Bordeaux.  The size of the book is also dependent on the paper types.  Certain paper types have more weight than others, hence a book with a heavier weight paper will make that book larger, and give it more weight with less pages.  If you haven't ordered your paper sample set, check out the blog posting below with more info on getting your own set.

This is a close up of the Roma with 30 pages.

It's not the largest of books, but with the thicker Cream Felt paper, it does give it a bit more weight than it would have with the Coated Matte paper.

The Paris book has 100 pages.

Even with the slightly thinner paper weight of the Coated Matte paper, at 100 pages, it's larger than the Roma, and is a great size book.

The next one is the East Hampton's book, also printed on the Coated Matte paper but with 150 pages.

I think this size and larger is the sweet spot for the books.  These feel like a robust book, and could sit on your coffee table next to all of your other books.

The Greenland book below has 200 pages, but is almost as thick as the larger page count Bordeaux at the bottom.

The Greenland book is printed on the 100% recycled paper by default, which is one of our thickest paper stocks.  The recycled paper has a softer finish, so it doesn't have quite the same pop as the Coated Matte paper, but the thickness of it is really nice.

Lastly, the 300 page Bordeaux.

This is as many pages as you can have in a book.  It's a very substantial, and is larger than any of the fine art photo books I have at home with the exception of the "Annie Leibovitz: A Photographers Life".

Just to give you an idea of the book sizes compared to a couple of books from the bookstore, I took a comparison shot for you.   At the bottom is the giant Annie Leibovitz book, at the top is a normal size photography book, and the Bordeaux and NY books, at 300 and 150 pages respectively, are in between.


Hope that helps to give you a better idea of the width of the books in comparison to page counts, and please let us know if you have any questions.

We're really excited about our new release of our Plug-in for Adobe's Lightroom, so we thought we'd make a little video demo of how it works.

After you have downloaded and installed the Plug-In (for more info on installation, check out: ), this demo will show you how to use the plug in to export your images to your COUTURE BOOK account directly from your edited Lightroom library.



Here's everything in a nutshell:

   1. Install Plug-in
   2. Open the images in Lightroom that you want to export
   3. Click on the export button on the bottom right
   4. Change the option from Export to Disk to Export to COUTURE BOOK
   5. Make sure your Jpeg export settings are set to 100%
   6. Pick the project you want to upload to, or type in the name of a new project
   7. Hit the Export button to start the export



This will send all of your corrected images automatically to your COUTURE BOOK account.  Once it's completed, it will open a browser window to the login page, and you can continue with your book order.

Step 1: Download

A plugin consists of a folder worth of files, with the folder having a name that ends with “.lrplugin”.
Installing a plugin involves simply moving the plugin folder to a place where Lightroom will find it, then restarting Lightroom.

Upon downloading, you'll want to unzip to create the plugin folder, then move that folder to the proper spot as described below.

Step 2: Installation

(The following applies to Lightroom 1.4 only. Lightroom 2.0 has different instructions. Skip to the bottom to see those.)

Installing on a Mac
You can simply click on it in Finder, and it will install for you. Cool.
To install either one manually, move the plugin folder to

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Modules/

to install for all users, or for just yourself, to the folder of the same name under your home:

~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Modules/

In either case you'll have to create the Modules folder within the Lightroom folder if it's not already there.

Installing on Windows XP
Move the plugin folder to this folder:

\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Modules\

where username is your Windows username. Note that you may have to visit the Folder Options dialog to allow the normally-hidden Application Data folder to be seen.

You must create the Modules folder within the Lightroom folder if it's not already there.

As an example, on my XP system, the “COUTUREBOOK.lrplugin” folder ends up as:

C:\Documents and Settings\rodrigo\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Modules\COUTUREBOOK.lrplugin

Installing on a Windows Vista
Move the plugin folder to this folder:

\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Modules\

Here, too, you'll have to create the Modules folder within the Lightroom folder if it's not already there.

Testing the Install
Restart Lightroom, select an image, then bring up the export dialog. Clicking in the top area of the export dialog should then bring up the newly-installed plugin in the list.

Uninstalling
You can uninstall or disable a plugin in a number of ways:
Delete the plugin folder, or move it to where Lightroom won't find it
Rename the plugin folder, for example, to “flickr.lrdevplugin-disabled”
Rename the “Info.lua” file inside the plugin folder (all plugins have an “Info.lua” file), e.g. to “Info.lua-disabled”

Lightroom 2.0 Installation

In Lightroom 2.0, navigate to File > Plugin Manager to bring up the plugin-manager dialog, click on the [Add] button in the lower-left, and navigate to wherever you've placed the “.lrplugin” folder for the plugin you'd like to install.

Check out this great Sign-In book David Wittig created with a 9x6 German Munich book:

The way he did the layout looks great, and was super simple!  To create the book, he just uplaoded his images, choose full bleed images from the border options, then clicked the "Right Side Only" option for the blank sign-in pages and that's it.  

Thanks David for sharing the cool book, and beautiful images.  You can check out more of David and the DWP crew's amazing work at:  http://blog.davidwittig.com/blog/

NEW PAPER SAMPLE PROCESS !!

We're all photographers over here at Couture Book, so we understand how important it is to know what your images are going to look like when printed, and we also understand how difficult it is to feel the quality of the books without seeing it in person.  It doesn't matter how many images or descriptions of our books we post, it'll always be a little short of having actual books or prints in your hands.

We do currently have a discounted studio sample program for books, but we also want you to be able to see YOUR images on all of the paper stocks before that first book order is placed.  With that in mind, we came up with the new Couture Book sample print program. 



This new program will let you put together two pages of you corrected images, and we'll print them out as is on all of our different paper stocks.  This is a great way for anyone thinking about using our books to get started!  With the samples you can not only see and feel the quality of our paper and printing, but you'll also be able to check out your calibration and see how your images look on the different stocks.



Here's how it works:
1. We have you design two 11x17 layouts full of images (see the link for the PSD templates: Sample pages.zip (109.61 KB) )
2. Log into your Couture Book Account - Click on "Create" on the homepage to get started
3. Create a new project
4. Select "Paper Sample" as your style type
5. Follow the instructions to upload your templates
6. Place order online

There is $45.00 cost to cover the printing and shipping (additional charges for international shipping).  Once you have placed your order, we'll send you a confirmation email and will get them started right away.  We usually have your sample pages out within five to seven business days from the date they are ordered.

With many of our books, we use a process called Smyth sewing for the binding.   Smyth sewing is basically the same process that has been used for years and years to professionally bind most if not all hard cover books.  Pull any of your fine art coffee table books from your bookshelf and nine times out of ten, they'll be bound using this process. 

The way the Smyth sewing works is we take several sheets of paper, fold them in half, and sew from the middle fold through the rest of the pages into the binding.  This bunch of paper is called a signature.

  

To make a book, several signature are then sewn together to form the block, or as I like to call it: the guts.   The guts are then mounted into casing or the outside cover via the end-sheets.



The end-sheets are generally blank or colored pages, although several of our styles do have printed end-sheets.  The sheets are first mounted to the inside cover and are then mounted to the first and last signatures of the book.  

To ensure that the books last a lifetime, the first and last signatures have to have a certain number of pages to give enough strength to the binding and end-sheets.   Because of this, occasionally additional blank pages are added to the end of the book which gives that final signature the number of pages needed.  

I do get the question as to where the sweet spots are to minimize any blank pages in the book.   The signatures are in sets of 16, and we need two blanks at the end for the mounting.  Although the calculation isn't too bad, I've attached a spreadsheet with all of the number crunching/page counting already done.  On it I've listed the page counts versus the number of blank pages at the end, and have highlighted the sweet spots :)
SignaturePageCount_current.xls (30.5 KB)



The Smyth process does take a bit longer is more labor intensive than some styles of binding (hand sewing, lining up every page perfectly, etc), but it's well worth it for the flexiblity and durability it gives the books. 

It's this binding that lets the books lay flat for a superior presentation of your images, and allows us to offer a lifetime guarantee on the binding of every book in the Couture Collection!