Creating A Viovio Book, the process…

It is always fun to get to the point of enough layouts to create a photo book. I love photo books and don’t print any single images anymore. This does cause problems when my child comes from school and say “Mom, I need a picture of this or that.” But then I just go through my photos, get the one they want, print it on my home computer and they can do anything they want with it. Anyway, back to photo books. Photo books make such a statement. If you have never seen one, you should do a test one. I think I have got many people digital scrapbooking by showing them the finished product. I have books printed from Shutterfly, Winkflash and Heritage Makers. Each company has their pros and cons.

For my next book, I am going to try Viovio. I am going to do a 10 x 10 book (since they don’t have 12 x 12 books) but the price is very reasonable. So I am taking you along on my process of taking my layouts to a book. I basically typed up this process as I was doing it and then it got really long so I am going to give it to you in a series of blog entries.

Proof your book

Enough said? Well, not for me. This is probably the biggest downfall of printing a photo book. If you find an error on page 5, you can’t just slip out that page, reprint that page and slip it back in. If you find an error you a) live with it or b) reprint it. So that is why I stress go proof your book. Later on in the series, you will find out Viovio creates a pdf of your book for you. I gave that pdf to my husband to proofread. In the last book, my son found an error that both myself and my husband missed, so I might just have him read through it too before I print. Nothing like having a 8 year old perfectionist son proofing your book.

Verifying nothing important will be cropped in your layouts:

The first thing you should do when you are creating a Viovio book, is make sure that if you are going to do full bleed, that none of your images are going to be cropped badly. Viovio provides a template to do this:

Crop Guideslines

One option in your Editor:

1. I opened up my layouts in my editor.
2. Placed the Viovio cropping template over each image.
3. 
4. Looked to see what would be cut for sure (red) and what might be cut (orange.)
5. I then rearranged my objects (or layers in some editors but ACDSee Photo editor calls them objects) so nothing will be cropped that is important. This is especially important for journaling & titles. A photo cropped might look intentional but journaling or title getting cut off looks bad.
6. I then deleted the Viovio overlay and resaved my file.

A second option to doing this in Photo Manager:

1. Double Click the image to open in the Photo Viewer
2. Select the crop button
3. By Looking at their template in the editor I have estimated on: (Red portion is the first number which will be cut and they say up to orange position which is the second number)
   1. A 12 x 12 inch image at 300 dpi, which is really 3600 x 3600 pixels, about 75 – 150 pixels may cut off. So I subtracted 115 pixes off and get a 3485 x 3486 image will be printed.
   2. A 10.25 x 10.25 inch image with 300 dpi, which is really 3075 x 3075 pixels, it looks like 60 – 120 pixels would be cut off. So I subtracted 90 of that to be safe. and got a 2985 x 2985 image will be printed.
4. So for a 12 x 12 inch image, I made a cropping template of 2985 x 2985 and now I can visible see what will be cropped.
5. So for a 10.25 x 10.25 inch image, I made a cropping template of 2985 x 2985 and now I can visible see what will be cropped.
6. Once I see how much will be cropped I just cancel out since I really don’t want to crop it. I was just using the crop tool to what the printer will crop. If you need to then you open up the file in your editor and adjust the layout.

So those are some tips for seeing how your images will be cropped!

Soon, I will blog about the next steps.

Subscribe to the comments for this post