Picture books by Apple Computers (part III)

So after about two weeks the book arrived. Even the packaging is stylish: a nice box with a big Apple logo on front. Inside de box, the book is wrapped nicely in a plastic sleeve. The first thing I noticed was that the book really feels like a book.

Let's take a look at the book! The hard cover is coated with a tightly woven texture giving the book a warm appearence. The card box that is used to give the cover the sturdiness feels pretty firm indeed. The inside part of the cover is nicely layed with a profiled sheet that forms the blind pages. The pages are glued and bound firmly. A close look at the pages that are bound shows that the pages are tightly alined. I'm not sure how durable the gluing is, but it looks a lot tougher than some professionally printed books I bought. The double side printed pages are glossy and has the right thickness.


Now, what about the quality of the pictures? I must admit I was pretty skeptical about the quality. The print outs of digital camera's I've seen so far were generally pretty grainy, especially parts with contrast and/or color differences. The pictures were probably made with camera's in the 3-4 megapixels range and probably also shot in a lower resolution than it was capable of. The more recent camera's in the 5-8 megapixels range should give better results.

A close look at the pictures in the book show that they are just below professional print quality. The sharpness is probably comparable to pictures in magazines, maybe a tad better. As mentioned before, digital camera prints can't compete with the quality of the traditional analog 35 mm film prints yet. Especially if you look real close, you still can see the 'dots' or pixels that forms the picture. Since I used many different pictures in different sizes, I wondered how they turned out. Uncropped or slightly cropped pictures turned out pretty good as (nearly) no resolution was lost. Parts (cut out) of pictures which were enlarged, some to full page while others as part of a multi picture lay out, suffers from some visible graininess. But again, this might be a lot less visable if on a smaller size book (or print out).

On the coloration side, the pictures turned out excellent. Pictures with good contrasting backgrounds are really amazing (check out the panoramic pictures). Some pictures were edited using iPhoto's 'temperature' altering function making the colors more vibrant. Other pictures, especially with darker areas and/or taken with low light situations, this alteration made them worse.


Check out some of the more technical parts of the book:








Well, this was my first iPhoto picture book. I am surprised how nice the book turned out. I had a lot of fun creating one and the joy of having a nearly professional looking picture book has to be experienced. If you want to make a memorable happening or trip to be truly lasting, you should seriously consider making a picture book. I'm sure you'll enjoy browsing through it and walk back the memory lane many times to come...