Danilo wrote:
Excellent body of work, Bozsik! You have obviously been working on the photography part of it for a long time, your efforts and talents show clearly on every page!
I am curious about how long the process took, once you had your images selected...days? Weeks? Months?
I'm glad you posted this, it's very enlightening, thank you!
Since I use LR4, it was fairly easy to generate the images. I have been flagging each of the images in yellow that I really like on each download. I exported them into one folder as jpgs:10 inches on the long side @ 300 dpi.
The free editing program was downloaded from Blurb. Since this book didn't require any special layout as I was just throwing many varied images together, it went together pretty fast. You can use many preset layouts or change them to suit your self. It is faster if you use the preset because you can have all of your images imported and flow into the preset. Then you go back and move what you want.
I wanted to mix everything up, so it took longer. The actual time for this layout was about a week for a couple of reasons. The custom publishing logo I added, I had to illustrate with a vector program I have. I also recommend taking at least three weeks to put one together. Throw the pages together, go away for a couple of days, then look at it again. Make necessary corrections, and have someone else look at it. Do the same thing another couple of days later. The time breaks really lets your brain have some downtime. This is valuable for the editing process.
I design exhibits for Museums and Nature centers. I sometimes use photography to aid in visually representing a concept, but the graphics are just as important. Sometimes I will start an illustration, and then after thinking on it, change the drawing to fit the rest of the imagery and text.
The key is not to rush into it. You should take at least a month to put something together. You will have to learn the limitations of the publishing software, but that is pretty easy. There are tutorials online as well. If you are familiar with page layout programs such as publisher, etc, you will not have any problems.
I hope this helps a bit. Let me know if you have any other questions. There are a few tricks you can do as well to achieve certain looks.