How To Make A Real Hardcover Photo Book Using Lightroom And Blurb

it's totally worth it having these books these are some of my most prized possessions it really makes me wonder [Music] wonder [Music] howdy I'm back to do another video here in my house and I'm kind of missing again now I'm doing some vlogs in the field but this is what I got right now so this is what I'm doing last week I think my weeks are blending together but I did a video called what the f am i doing and one of the things that I'm doing that I mentioned that people ask several questions about these books that I make every day so I put together a little book of my photos every year and I do one of my nature photography so wildlife and landscapes and stuff like that and I just you know I select some of my favorite images usually a hundred ish or so and I put them together in a little book so I keep it over here on the bookshelf and I can flip through them anytime I want and it's just a really cool thing to do at the end of every year to kind of go through and just relive the year and the photos that I made and it's a it's pretty fun and then I also do the same thing with my family photos so I take a lot of pictures of my kids and you know just all the fun stuff we do I like to document it and kind of like old school you know photo album where you used to paste them into a book well I just have this thing printed up with fun moments and stuff that cool photos that I've taken of family stuff so a lot of people asked about how I'm doing that so that's what I'm here to do today I'm gonna show you for the most part I'm not gonna do it like super detailed I'm gonna give you an overview of it and you'll have to figure out some of the little stuff nuances and adapt it to the type of book that you want to make the the broad overview here is that I'm using Adobe Lightroom which is what I use to catalog and head it all of my images anyways and there's a book module in here so I use that book module and that book module allows you to build the book and lay out the images and set the sizes and crop them and add page numbers and titles and all kinds of stuff in there and then it automatically will interface with blurb and blurb com you can have your book just basically printed directly from here you can set up all the options automatically upload it and then it just jumps onto their website you can click order and they show up and they're quite expensive but to me it's totally worth it so like this book I think if I was to buy this what it isn't on discount it would be like a hundred and fifty bucks maybe but I usually I signed up for their email list and they're almost always having some kind of a decent sale so I got I ordered these during a 40% off sale and I usually just wait until I see a good 40% off sale and then I order my books for the year and it works out pretty well so they are expensive to me it's totally worth it having these books these are some of my most prized possessions so with that intro done let's jump into Lightroom here and I'll kind of show you how to get started and how to work through it the whole way I'm gonna do a sample book of let's see you I just picked 12 images you know I do it like a hundred and fifty on these books so I'm just gonna build a whole book right here it's gonna be a tiny book only twelve images but you'll get the idea of how it all works so I'm gonna jump right in I'm in Lightroom now one of the hardest things about this is selecting your images so I've already done that and I have put the images that I want to be in the book into a collection so I'm assuming you know how to do all this stuff if you don't find a tutorial that can help you put images into a collection and edit them these are all ready to go they're edited they're in this collection you can see over here there are twelve images in this collection that is named best book in the history of the world I know that's not true either but I had to name it something so that's what I did so now I've got these 12 images sitting here and if you look up here I'm in the library module which is what you normally would be in when you're working with images and editing if you go up here you now see that there's the book module so once I have this collection selected over here sorry right here I select that collection I can see those images and now I'm just gonna go up here and click book now it automatically builds this book for me when I do that and you can see how it built that now that's because that's the way that the default preset is set up and I'm going to change that because this isn't what I want so I can see how the Lightroom built that book and as I said that's not what I want so I'm gonna do a couple of things here I am now going to go into this little section here called Auto layout and see how it says there's a preset there that shows the left page blank and the right has one photo and that's how it built every page the left one is blank and the right one is a photo so if i zoom in to there you can see here's the pages left one blank right one a photo and that is not what I want so I'm gonna change that I built one that I call nature book preset so I would typically use that I set that up one time and I use it but I'll show you how to do this so I'm going to edit the auto layout preset now you can see here on the left side it shows a blank page for this book I want to them both to be the same and I want it to be one photo that is fills up most of the sheet this one will bleed all the way out to the edge this one will leave a little white border I happen to like that little white border so that's what I'm gonna do this zoom photos to fit I'm gonna say leave it on fit because that will leave if I have a vertical image then it will leave it as a vertical image instead of filling it to this we're size similar same with a horizontal image it's gonna leave it as a horizontal image and not zoom in to fill the entire square okay so that's what I'm gonna do there and that's all I'm gonna do for this one okay I'll just title this YouTube because that's what I'm doing okay so right now I've got this preset now set up for YouTube now if I hit that clear layout button right there see how it scratched the old layout that wasn't working the way we wanted it to now I'm going to tell it to Auto layout so now it's gonna take those all those images my 12 images you might have 100 or 200 and it'll build a whole book in the order that you have it in your collection it's now gonna place those into the book and it's gonna fill one page one image per page so this is my starting point now at this point I have really good flexibility to change this the way I want if you see up here this is my cover now if I don't want this picture as my cover back cover then I can just change it it's a drag-and-drop kind of a thing so if I want the cover of this to be let's say I like I actually like this this image to be on the front cover so I'm just gonna grab that drag it over there okay that's a new one now I actually the cover it makes it to fill the frame because it's a hardcover wrap that I have set up and actually let's look at that now that I brought that up so if we go to the upper right corner over here you can choose what type of book you want I'm doing a blurb photo book this standard landscape size now these that I that I have done or the biggest the 12 inch by 12 inch large square that's how I like mine they're the most expensive as well so I'm going to change those it does some readjustments there the premium luster of paper is great I'm going to use that logo page if you turn the logo page off just at the bottom of the page here or the final image there's a little blurb logo and they give you a little bit of a discount if you have a logo page on there and then it'll show you what your estimated prices so for this little tiny book at 65 bucks as I mentioned when I do them like a hundred and fifty images or so it usually turns out to be about one hundred and fifty bucks and I buy it on sale and it usually ends up being about 80 bucks a book or so for me okay so now we have our basic layout here so I've got my front cover my back cover I can just see how I can kind of crop this and zoom in and out if I want I actually don't like this image for the back cover so I'm gonna just hit delete there and let's say I like this image for my back cover I'm gonna right-click on it and say zoom to fit so now it fills up I can just kind of drag it across to like that so now this is the cover of my book front cover back cover now the book starts here so I'm looking at this if you look in the lower left corner I'm looking at this in kind of the whole book layout I can look at it as just a single page page by page I actually prefer working in this mode where I can see how they're gonna lay out together and so here's my cover front cover and back cover they're set up nicely this this image here I don't want on a single page so what I'm gonna do I'm gonna go back here I'm gonna find a different image to lead with and I'm gonna drag it over here it's gonna automatically swap this one over here now because this is such a long narrow image I'm going to zoom in on it see how it's just super long it's like that big I'm gonna make this a double a double spread so now I have this image here I did the auto layout I can now change the layout on Hitty page I want and because I want this to be a double layout I'm going to change the page layout to a single photo let's call it a two-page spread I can leave a little white border around it and bang now I've got a double-page spread there and it automatically moved shifted all the other photos out of the way so here's my cover there's the coyote on page one now I've got a double page spread with that bison image by the way all these images I just grabbed twelve images that I took during my January winter in Yellowstone workshop that happened just a couple months ago I'll be doing that again in the coming January so let me know if you're interested in joining me on that trip it's awesome and we're gonna have a blast when during Yellowstone it's like magic so anyway let's continue on with this so here I am looking at my book so far so I feel like we've we've nailed this this this now we can look at I've got a coyote here with some bison here I actually like this image here as a double two-page spread as well so I'm gonna select that I'm gonna come over here to the right and tell it I want a two-page spread like that and you have a ton of different layouts you can choose from with two photos four photos they have all kinds of different layouts anyway so now I've got a new double page spread there and then I'm looking for I now have a blank page here I can just drag and drop I can drag that right in bang that looks good so now I'm like more than halfway done with my book here look page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 those all look good now I've got some blank pages here because I've been shifting them around super easy to get rid of those I'm just gonna highlight them select them right click remove the pages boom they're gone so now I'm on to my next set if I wanted to add a page it's very simple I just right-click in there anywhere and say add a blank page so a blank page is blank and then I have to go tell it if I want to do some text for instance there's a little text box I can put the photo in there so you have really a ton of flexibility with all these different layouts that are happening with multiple-page spreads and three photos and text so they give you a lot of flexibility here I'm not utilizing those for this particular book but you have that option you can do that however you want I'm gonna remove this page cuz I was just showing you what that is it automatically relays out everything below so it leaves everything above the way I had it because I like that I'm happy with this page layout in fact I might swap these to just bang it's that easy I like having the the weasel' running into the middle of the frame instead of running off the frame this way but you can do this however you'd like I like the way these are laid out that one's laid out so the auto layout did a pretty good job for me there bang I would consider this a done book now if you want to get in there I'll just show you real quick like it's very easy to add in a caption I can if I just single click on any image see how it pops up here it says add photo text I can just click on that and if I just want to title it the date like this was January 2020 and this is a long-tailed weasel so there's my caption now that caption I can you know adjust the text like right now it's left justified it's a myriad Pro so I can go in here I can Center it I can change the font to whatever whatever you want it to be you can change the size of it you can you know you have a fair amount of flexibility here now I've got a big one okay so anyway just to demonstrate that you can add text you can add text boxes that'll wrap you can add captions you can add text to your cover same way I'm not gonna do that here because it's just kind of a waste of time now that you know how to do it you'll just be able to figure it out on every page it's super easy but then I can just scroll page to page with the right and left arrows and look through how my how my book is looking and there's the last page so I can just review it and go yes these images work together well how that looks great is a double two-page spread these work well together that's a nice double spread and then here's my cover so anyway there's a lot of flexibility here that I haven't shown you because I've try and keep it simple but you can go deep deep deep into this and there's a lot of flexibility so at this point let's say I've I've totally got this the way I want it I've reviewed it I'm sure this is the way I want it to be and now it's as simple as you know double-checking verify that you have your book set up to be the the size and style of book that you want just verify everything looks good the way you want it you and then down here at the bottom send the book to blurb and it's you're gonna create an account with blurb it's gonna automatically compile the book and upload it for you so it's ready at that point to print and then it'll automatically open up the blurb website and you can click order now enter a coupon code and then they show up about a week later so it works really great just keep in mind that this can be a long process when you've got hundreds of images but if they're already edited and if you've already selected the images this process goes pretty fast I'll show you real quick my family photo instead of using the like we did here with having one image per page just a big square image as the auto the default auto layout that works great for these in the family book I want to kind of jam pack more images in here and I don't necessarily care if they're big and beautiful so you'll notice a lot of these pages have two images so my default page layout for my family book is a two image layout so I just go to the select the two photos and then I grab one of these like this one would work great okay and and it automatically lays out all the images as two and then if I want to adjust like this one you know I've got the this laid out automatically there and then I didn't want two images on this page so I just changed that I just click on this page layout over here and tell it I only want one image here and bang if build rebuild that page with only one image so I do that you know I don't know how much of the time maybe twenty percent of the time where I have one image and then two images so you can lay that out however you want but get in there and fiddle with it get just get used to using it but I found it that it it's a really cool thing that as I mentioned these are some of my most treasured possessions so I had enough comments people asking about how I do this that I wanted to make a reasonably quick video how to do it so I hope this was helpful even though it's not like every single step like pointed out to you I mean that would be an hour-long video or more so I just say get in there use this as a big picture look at how to do this and then dive in and adapt it to whatever your needs are because they're gonna be different than mine but I just wanted to show you how simple how easy and how powerful it can be and I hope you go make some books I love mine and it's just a great way to enjoy your photography on an ongoing basis having these books sitting out on the coffee table to flip through once in a while it's pretty cool so anyway thanks for watching I hope that's helpful leave me some comments and questions below and I'll do my best to answer them and I don't want to get too deep deep deep deep into the weeds with little tiny technical minutiae because I certainly am NOT the foremost expert on doing this but I've done it enough that I keep it simple and I'm able to do it so have a great day see you next time you

Channel: Steve Mattheis

Views: 15,672

Keywords: nature, photography, photo, wildlife, outdoor, landscape, Nikon, vlog, tetons, grand, teton, jackson, hole, wyoming, D850, Z7, photobook, print, publish

Id: 9xQnlPQ80Zw

Length: 20min 19sec (1219 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 21 2020