Dragonophile

I am putting together a photo book using Adoramapix and I am - for the first time - stumbling upon the concept of printer bleeding. Bummer! Too many of my pictures are very tight to the edges and I am afraid it is going to effect the final pictures in printing. Don't ask me to explain bleeding other than to say some of the edge detail may be lost in the final product. So from now on, when I take pictures, I am going to give my subjects (birds; ships) more breathing room. Even the print preview won't account for bleeding so I guess I won't know how my pictures will survive the printing process until my book arrives! And it will be an expensive book! Hope I am not too disappointed as the pictures look good on a tv monitor even when subjects are close to the edges.

I suppose I should have educated myself more on the printing process. In addition to bleeding, it is never a straightforward process to change the size or aspect ratio of pictures using publishing software packages. I often drop pictures on a page & then try to utilize more empty space by enlarging the picture. But that alters the picture in ways that surprised me when I first attempted it. Perhaps photography books should have tips on how to take pictures to make them look good in photo books. I suspect publishers sometimes design templates with big margins around pictures to save on ink?????

Leitz Loc: Solms

blackest Loc: Ireland

usually the bleed on a page is around 2mm, this is because the page will be cut with zero bleed you may get a fine white border on the page edge.
If you leave a margin around the photo it's not a problem. Often a book outer edge is left blank this is because this is where your fingers go and can lift the ink, the inner edge tends to get a margin too so the image is not hidden in the spine of the book. If you have these margins you do not have a problem with bleed.

If you have a border or frame this can be used to cover the bleed area another handy trick is to mirror the edges of your photo often this looks quite natural if just a few mm is used and the background supports it.

Full page photo's can look good especially when the facing page uses a large border , which helps relieve the busyness of the full page, you might also use a black page for a large image maybe with a frame around the photo. it depends what you like but giving your photo some space to sit in tends to look better than filling the page completely. it often looks pretty good to leave a gap to one side rather than splitting it either side.

Good luck with the book.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I've made quite a few books with Adoramapix, and I always use the open format - just blank pages where I can make my own designs. Every time I start a new book, I struggle with formatting pictures to fit onto the pages. The lines show what areas will be left off the page, so you know what to expect. You can let the images bleed off the page if the lost area isn't important. Actually, I can't think of many situations where the extreme edge of the image is very important. When you have all your pictures in place, look at the preview, and you'll see just how your book will appear.

If you really get stuck, they will provide support.

SonyBug

I am glad that all the replies say "bleed" as that is what it is called. I pictured some weird cutting your wrists thing from the original post.

blackest Loc: Ireland

Affinity designer is very nice (and cheap) for laying out pages, it can create a pdf with bleed and publishers marks, I created some page layout templates to quickly create pages. Pretty easy really to create a rectangle on a page and paste an image into the rectangle you can do similar for text boxes if you want them and its easy to get layouts to snap to good positions without working too hard aligning objects. It's good fun too and looks very professional when done.

billnikon Loc: Pennsylvania/Ohio/Florida/Maui/Oregon/Vermont

I use Shutterfly, it shows me the final images before I order (a preview) , their preview is very accurate so you can see exactly what is included and what is not.

sippyjug104 Loc: Missouri

In my past life, I performed the graphic needs for our Corporation and I worked with several graphic houses to produce my work. Typical printers has wheels that pull the paper through. The ink cannot be applied where the wheels would track over it. There is also a leading and trailing edge which is free of ink. The result is that the artwork or picture has a white border around it as though it were framed. Dyesupplimation process is different.

"Bleeds" are areas of the image that well be trimmed off in production so that the result is the artwork or picture covers the entire media edge to edge. Hence the image is slightly oversized for the desired piece of paper it will be printed on. Imagine it as though you printed your picture on your desktop inkjet printer and then took a scissor and trimmed it. You could say that the "white area" was the images bleed. Another example would be if you printed the picture on an oversize piece of paper and then took the scissor and cut it to the final dimension. The discarded area could be referred to as the bleed.

blackest Loc: Ireland

trimming is quite difficult which is why there is a small tolerance of 2mm, most people won't miss a couple of mm of an image but they will notice a thin strip of white paper.

Dragonophile

Thanks for all the replies.

rook2c4 Loc: Philadelphia, PA USA

I almost never print up to the edges of the paper, as I've had repeated incidents of ink smearing in the past. Instead, I either print on larger paper, or reduce the size of the image, then carefully trim unwanted excess border with a paper cutter.

JaiGieEse Loc: Foxworth, MS

I'll speak from nine years experience working in the pre-press department of a mid-sized print shop.

The print shop uses a big ol' trimmer that can guillotine very thick stacks of paper at a time. Obviously, when you're trimming so many pages, all the print pages in the stack cannot be perfectly aligned.

To accomodate this, a print job that includes art work running to the edge of the finished sheet should have a ⅛ bleed - which is to say, the image must extend .125 inches beyond the edge of the sheet.

This allows the trimmer sufficient leeway so as to avoid the unsightly white edges on the finished product.

If you do not add bleed, you are asking for trouble.

It's always a good idea to compose your shots so as to allow for needed bleed room. I you haven't done that, you can go into Photoshop, add the .125 inches to the canvas, select the white area, and then do a content-aware fill. Check for anomalies and you're good to go.

louparker Loc: Scottsdale, AZ

My experience has been that how much of the image you lose to a bleed depends on who makes the book. I have never used Adorama but have used Shutterfly with very good success -- very little image cut off, but have had tremendous problems with Mixbook, Picaboo and Kodak Gallery before they went out of business, with images being vertically off-center so that more of the top of the image is lost than the bottom and vice versa. However, Mixbook, Picaboo and Kodak Gallery have always done reprints because of the problem. In fact, this has been such a problem that I am now on my 10th, yes 10th reprint with my current 300-page Mixbook photo book and before that both Picaboo and Kodak Gallery had to reprint my books 7 times -- all, of course, at no charge to me. When I confronted Mixbook about this, they said it's not a printing problem but a trimming and binding problem, which is done manually, and they told me there could be up to a 3/16 inch variance. I asked Blurb about this and they told me the same thing. When I asked both Mixbook and Blurb why Shutterfly doesn't seem to have this problem, I got no answer.

Bottom line is that I have quit using bleeds at all (I used to use a lot of them) and avoid placing images too close to the edge of the page -- more white space sets off the images better anyway and if there is uneven centering or placement, it is less noticeable the more white space you have. If you still want to use bleeds, then your idea of reframing your image so that it has more image around all 4 sides is good so that if part of the extra image is cut off in trimming or binding, you're still o.k.

Boris77

I guess it is fashionable to run pictures "off the edge", but I always liked to have my photographs defined as complete by the page. Last time I set up a photo book there was a template available that did not crop the images.
I noticed years ago that the photo books I really enjoyed looking at all had damaged edges from handling. If you compose your pictures tightly (yeah!!), do them the favor of blank edge spacing to preserve the full image.

If you do persist in bleed images, Photo Shop will easily add to specific edges for the trim. All you need to know is the exact Amount to be cut off, find a Printer that is consistent, and get the Experience to see what they really do. Many printers are very good, but I would always do a small test project before trying to output a masterpiece. In one shot you can become an expert.
Boris

louparker Loc: Scottsdale, AZ

Again, it's not a "printing" issue, it's a trimming and binding issue. And 2mm is being very optimistic -- I've experience as much as a quarter inch loss from bleeds or image misalignment on a page, which, again, is the result of how the pages are trimmed and bound AFTER printing. You should definitely ask the particular photo book company you want to use about what their "tolerances" are for bleeds and adjust your images accordingly, or better yet, forget about using bleeds. As I and another poster said, images are set off and stand out better if they have white (or black depending on your preference) space on all 4 sides. Bleeds, however are good if you want your photo book to look more like a magazine rather than a display of your images. That's another reason why I rarely use bleeds anymore.