Just in case you haven't seen it yet, we've teamed up with David Jay, ShowIt and Adobe and will be coming to a town near you!

We're going to be traveling in style in this new tour bus that DJ hooked up:


The tour starts at the end of the July and goes through the begining of September.   Here's a link to the dates, locations, and registrations: http://www.davidjay.com/tour

Find a stop close by, sign up, and we'll see you there!!

We get many questions regarding the specifications for page layout on our books.  The short and sweet answer is your working canvas should be set to the size of the book at 300 DPI in sRGB. 

For instance, if you were laying out an 8x10 book, you'd start with a canvas that was 8 inches wide, by 10 inches tall at 300 dpi.   The only book size that is not exactly the right size is the 9x6, which is actually 8.5x6.

What about the trimming on the edges?    We do trim about 1/16 of an inch off the outside edges, and between 1/16th and an 1/8th of an inch on the books with the hand torn edges.     You'll still want to setup your pages exactly the same way, but just be aware that the edges will be trimmed a hair.

By the way, the full bleed pages look fantastic with the hand torn edges!  See below:




What about double page spreads, or panoramic images?   You can absolutely setup a double page spread with images going across the middle.   The only tricky part about pano pages is they need to be split into the left page and the right page before uploading.  The way I layout my books is I start with a double page canvas, layout all of my pages, and then on the last step, I crop it to split it into the left side and right side.

There is basically no center gutter to worry about in the design either.   There is a fold, as you can see in the picture above, so I wouldn't run text across the middle or put the brides head there, but you can definitely run a full image through the center.

Back to our 8x10 example, for a double page spread, we'd start with a 16x10 page, create the layout and then split it into the 8x10 sides.  Those of you more savvy with Photoshop can probably whip up an action to batch process all of those spreads into the sides, thus saving a bunch of time.

Hope that helps and happy designing!

We are happy to be featured in the Adobe Showcase on Adobe.com, and here's a link to the Case Study done on COUTURE BOOK.
Here's a shout out to Frederick over at Adobe for helping make this happen. Thanks Frederick!

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!

If you get the following error when running the flipbook application, most likely you need to update your Flash Player:

1.       Make sure you have the latest version of Flash installed (http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash)

2.       Reboot your browser.

If you do that, and still have trouble, please send us an email at help@couturebook.com with the following information:

• Order Number
• Browser (and version)
• Operational System (Windows Vista, XP, Mac OS) and so on.

I hope this helps.

 

Rafael

Just got back from an excellent night out at the Pictage User Group in Chicago: Http://pug.pictage.com.  It was so much fun meeting everyone in Chicago, and I wanted to thank David Wittig (http://www.davidwittig.com/) the host of the group for inviting us out!



For those of you that don't know the Pictage User Groups, they are a little local groups of photographers that get together once a month to talk about local business, network with each other, and chat about Pictage.  Even if you are not a Pictage member, they can be a great way to meet local studios.





Also, this was just a first stop on our world tour coming in May and June.  Actually it's just a nation wide tour, but we are putting our itinerary together now, so if you are interested in us coming to your neck of the woods, pleaes drop us a note: dave@couturebook.com

Hope we see you soon!

-The Couture Team