Making a Simple Phone Photo Book
Okay. Last time we talked about comparing your edit to the original with fresh eyes, and how the fifteen minutes between "done" and "actually done" saves you from your own enthusiasm. That's the last of the fixing lessons. Today we're doing something different. We're making a thing.
This is the whole reason I started this. I fixed photos for probably a year before it occurred to me that a folder of nicely-edited pictures is basically the same as a folder of un-edited ones. It just sits there. Nobody looks at a phone folder for fun. But a photo book sits on the coffee table and people pick it up.
Jeffrey from two doors down is actually a good example of why this matters, even though his story was about a single photo, not a book. He borrowed my drill a while back and returned it with a photo of the shelf he'd built, taken right in front of a window so the shelf was just a black shape and the window was a blown-out white rectangle behind it. Couldn't see the shelf at all. Took me about ninety seconds to fix, mostly cropping in and bringing the shadows up, and Jeffrey stood there kind of stunned that it was the same picture. He'd had that photo for two weeks and never looked at it twice. Once it was fixed, he sent it to his mom. That's the difference. An edited photo you never do anything with is still just sitting there. A fixed photo that goes into a book, or gets sent to somebody, or gets printed and hung up, that's a photo that did its job.
So today: a simple phone photo book. Nothing fancy. Here's how I'd do it at home.
Step 1: Pick your photos first, edit second
Go through your camera roll and pick 20 to 30 photos around one subject. A trip, a season, a kid's year, whatever. Don't edit as you go, just tap the heart or add-to-favorites on the ones you want. Editing while you're still deciding what's in the book is how you spend three hours polishing a photo that doesn't even make the cut.
Step 2: Do your basic fixes on that group only
Now go back through just those 20 to 30 and do the stuff we've already covered. Crop out the junk on the edges. Fix the exposure if it's too dark or too bright. Fix white balance if it's got that blue-gray indoor look. Nothing complicated. This is maintenance, not a redesign.
One edit at a time, close the app, look again with fresh eyes, like we talked about. I'm not going to re-explain the whole thing, you know the drill by now.
Step 3: Pick a photo book app
Most printing services (the ones that mail you an actual physical book) have a free app for laying it out. I'm not going to tell you which one, honestly, because they change and what's available depends on where you are. Search "photo book" in your app store and you'll find two or three decent free ones. Free is fine. This is a beginner project, you don't need the fancy version of anything.
Step 4: Import your edited photos, not the whole camera roll
Import just your picked, fixed set. Most of these apps will auto-layout the book for you, one or two photos a page. Let it do that first pass. Don't fight the auto-layout on page one, just see what it gives you.
Step 5: Go through page by page and fix the obvious problems
This is where the crop earns its keep again. Auto-layout tools love to crop a photo weird, chop somebody's head at the forehead, that kind of thing. Go page by page and adjust. This is slow the first time. Give yourself a real chunk of time, not fifteen minutes before dinner.
A caution here, and it's a real one: double check the photo resolution before you order anything printed. A photo you took years ago at low resolution, or a screenshot, can look fine on your phone screen and come out blurry or pixelated on an 8x10 page. Most apps will flag a low-res photo with a little warning icon. Don't ignore that icon.
Step 6: Order one copy before you order five
If you're making it as a gift, or for the whole family, order a single proof copy first. Look at it in your hands. Printed color and screen color aren't always the same, and you want to catch that on one copy, not on five.
My opinion here, and it's just mine: most photos need less editing than people give them. That goes double once you're laying out a book. You want the pages to feel like a consistent set, not ten different experiments. Restraint reads as put-together. Overdoing every single page reads like somebody just discovered the sliders.
Anthony's daughter's wedding photos have been sitting on my "photos people want fixed" spreadsheet tab for I don't know how long now, so I'm not going to stand here and pretend I finish every project I start. I don't. But the ones I do finish, the photo books especially, get picked up and looked at for years. That's worth the slow Saturday it takes.
Before next time: start pulling together your 20 to 30 photos for a book, even if you don't finish the whole thing. Just get the picking-and-editing part done, we'll talk layout troubleshooting together next class. 😊