How To Ensure Great Print Quality of Your Photo Book

Get a semi-professional camera

Everyone has a smartphone these days. So, it’s only natural that this is the go-to device for taking photos on a daily basis. But while pictures taken with your phone are great for Instagram, their poor quality is clear when you try to print them. Having at least a semi-professional camera is necessary if you want to let your inner photographer go wild.

The biggest differences between a camera and a smartphone are the sizes of the sensor and lens. Since smartphones are getting thinner by the day, it’s impossible to include a large enough sensor and lens to take photos with the necessary resolution for printing. An easy way for you to see this is by zooming in on an image on your smartphone. The more you zoom, the blurrier it becomes. By contrast, a semi-professional camera allows you to zoom in without losing much quality. So, if you’re after macro shots of a rare bird perched high in a tree, you may want to leave your smartphone at home for a change.

Print on heavier paper

Even photos taken with a reliable camera may look terrible when printed on poor quality paper. Thick paper will take you one step closer to better quality. The standard photo paper is matte and fairly thin, but you’ll need thick paper for a photo book. This is because while standard paper types don’t necessarily display bad quality images, they do tend to be unpleasant to touch and will end up covered in fingerprints. Also, quality covers like leather are a no-go with standard paper. White matte 65lb card stock is heavy enough, though, and it can be used by most photo book builders, such as Printique. You can also opt for book quality thickness (300lb) with companies like PrestoPhoto.

Ensure high resolution

Believe it or not, a photo taken from far away can look good when it has a high enough resolution. The ideal is 300dpi or above, and it’ll likely come out blurry if it’s under 150dpi. This also means you have to manually set your photos’ resolution before printing them, which you could only do with printing machines before. Luckily, most photo book editors will do this for you today. But just for reference, don’t go under 1024×768, which is the bare minimum of decent quality – albeit quite small – photos.

Use photo editing software

After making use of these practices, photo editing software can help take you to the next level. They allow you to correct the small mistakes you may only notice when putting your book together, among other features. For example, the boy next door may have photobombed your family photo, and you can remove him with the help of some cutting tools. Moreover, photo editors help you with color correction, red eye and noise removal, and much more. As a cherry on top, you can count with these apps to spice up your images with filters.

How photo book builders can help

Photo book builders are great for avoiding poor quality photos that can ruin your final product. For example, Mixbook prevents you from printing the photo book when something’s off. Shutterfly works similarly, sending you a ‘not recommended’ message when a photo’s resolution is too low. Some photo book editors also show you a ‘soft proof’ – an online example of what your printed book will look like. The downside is that you need a high-quality calibrated monitor, among other things, to fully benefit from this.

Following these tips will ensure high print quality, and you’ll have some fun manually tweaking everything. Plus, you’ll create the perfect photo book to display in your living room, learn some new tricks while doing it, and save a lot of money by not hiring a professional photographer.