Vintage style family albums

[sehkmet22]

The vintage style is wonderful. I have now used it to make two different family albums with photos ranging from the late 19th century to now.
I scanned my photos in at 300 ppi (some at 600ppi if they were small). I did have to scale some of them down before importing them into Book Maker as they were 7 or more mb.

I also made family tree diagrams in PowerPoint, saved them as jpegs at 300ppi (which Power Point for Mac allows). The turned out great. One was a double page spread.

The books are beautiful. I can't wait to give them as Christmas gifts.

I'd post links to the books, but there are personal data in the books such as birthdates, etc.

One small issue: the black photo corners used on some of the page templates have a flaw. On one of the arms of the corner, half of the arm is offset by a few pixels (i.e., it looks sort of like this ___-----). I did not notice this on the preview, but it is noticeable on the printed pages. It occurs on every photo corner; I assume they are all the same element that was used in designing the templates. The abberation is present in both books, printed with different orders.

-A.

[alwaysbehind]

thank you so much for listing how you saved your photos (you mentioned most were saved with 300 ppi). What size did you crop them before you uploaded them to Bookmaker? 4x6?, 3x5? or larger?

Someone earlier mentioned that if the picture was scanned too large in size, it didn't print out well (decreased pixels). To me, this doesn't make sense because it would seem that we'd only lose pixels if we scanned too small and when the picture was enlarged to a full bleed or one picture per page in the book, we'd lose pixels.

If you scanned at 4x6 and you used one shot per page in your book, how was the quality of that picture? thanks much

[sehkmet22]

I didn't pay too much attention to the final image sizes.
Most I left exactly as I scanned them. The only ones I resized we those that were bigger than 4MB.
I definately had several that were 8x10 at 300 ppi when I uploaded them to BookMaker. All of the pictures that were a full bleed were 8 x10 at 300 dpi. I did size down my family tree power point made jpgs a timy bit, maybe to like 250 ppi at 8.3 x 11.5.

I did have some 8x10s at 300 ppi that went into some of the smaller spaces that printed fine.

The reason that overly large pictures might not print out so well is because if the prining device can't print all the pixels that are in the file some of them have to be discarded. Depending upon which pixels are discarded, it might make the picture look bad.

I don't know that I've been too much help.
-A.

[kathyb]

Could you please explain how you did your family tree in power point?

[shullfish]

I put a family tree in my scrapbook as well. You can actually use any application that can output to a JPEG.

I did mine in Adobe InDesign. Illustrator or Photoshop would also work, though Photoshop is NOT a good application for creating text.

I would think that if you can get a JPEG image out of Microsoft Word, you could do it in Word. Or even create it in Word and print it, then scan it.

[kathyb]

Thanks for your explanation. You sound like a pro. I will need to think about what you said to wrap my brain around it.

[sehkmet22]

> Could you please explain how you did your family tree
> in power point?

Sorry for the really late reply. I haven't checked here in ages!

Anyway, regarding creating my family tree in power point:

I created a power point slide that was 3 times the size of the MyPublisher page. (I did this because Power Point saves jpgs at 72 ppi, and you want your image around 250ish ppi to print well). This is accomplished by chosing "File" and the "Page Setup."

I then created a slide with little rounded corner boxes for the names and dates, with lines connecting them in typical family tree style.

I then saved the slide as a .jpg ("Save as", choose "jpeg" from dropdown menu) and imported it into my book as I would anyother picture.

It's fairly simple.

I hope that helped and wasn't way too late to be useless.

-A.

[Rundex]

I just Created a Vintage Family Album, and as I was Collecting images I had to go with the size Images were sent to me. As My Book is also a Christmas Gift I could Not make too many demands and Most were Not scanned at a High Resolution. I found that the Vintage Style Album worked well with the Smaller sized images.
I have Posted my Album, Please let me know what You Think. Thanks!
http://www.mypublisher.com/bookshelf/bookviewer.py?d=tq%3Ey-cppl%60je%3E3495538