New iPhoto Book hot off the press

Finally – I’ve finished the book illustrating our East Coast trip from the summer of 2010. An once again, Apple does not disappoint.

 

Cover of iPhoto book: East Coast 2010

The photos were processed in Photoshop Lightroom 3 then exported as high quality jpegs and imported into iPhoto ’11. From there, I dragged them into the project file and began creating, assembling and writing. I used the ‘Modern Lines’ theme for its clean look. I tried some of the less formal themes but found that I lost “photo space” to “page space”. I want the photos to dominate, not the page or the graphics.

The book ended up being 76 pages in length with 173 photos – the best of which are full page. The bulk of the text is set in 11pt DearJoe4 – a great handwriting font available as a free, incomplete font from dafont.com or as a full font from the creator at  joebob.nl

I’m really pleased with how well everything came together. Only two complaints:

• 

  p75 with photos reversed compared to what I preferred

  on one of the last pages, I wanted two small photos on the left with one large on the right to keep the somewhat chronological flow and iPhoto would only allow the larger pic on the right;

• 

  Cut off ascenders on p72

  on 4-photo page, I wanted two full lines of text which I achieved by reducing the font size to 9pt, decreasing the leading to 0.83 but still, the very tops of the ascenders were cut off. BTW if you want a great resource for typography – have a look at Adobe’s online booklet; Typography Primer. It is very informative. It looks like a booklet Apple published about 20 years ago which they included with the Mac Classic.

These two complaints are a small price to pay for a great looking book. I could have remedied the second problem, but the first is an in-built design selection by Apple. And I can see why they keep the larger photo on the left of a right-hand page as the two smaller photos would be lost or squeezed if the larger photo was on the right.

Here are a few of the other pages:

 

The reproduction of the black and whites is superb on p9

This photo-on-photo of Dickson Falls on p21 worked very well

 

Composite of 2 photos created in Photoshop

 

One of my favourite photos is of our daughter Allison at the Habitation, Port Royal, Nova Scotia, dressed in period costume - it deserved a full page!