Making a Photo Story Book

I have done a small amount of different kinds of books. Some of the ones I did with Blurb can be found on the right hand column of the blog. I have also bound and cased in my own photo book from scratch. This entailed hand sewing the pages together, gluing in C-prints of my photos, casing in the book and wrapping it in book binder's leather. I was please for my first attempt though I picked the project up and dropped it over the years so it probably took 4 years to finish! So daunted I felt at various phases. Never-the-less a valuable experience.

I also made a book from a text block I bought and then cased it in myself. I describe the process here. Another satisfying project that ended up as a gift.

More recently I self-published a long story about a river trip with my brother. I had a good response to this and I have been in the process of editing it to make it a better story with the help of my cousin who used to be a book editor.

This last project led me to revise what started out as a blog post 11 years ago. This was about a backpacking trip we took in 1987 in the Maze District in Canyonlands National Park. This turned into a Blurb book with a link to it on the right side of this blog.

The Video

Below is how I developed the project. I subsequently documented how I did this with a 25 minute video of the process. There are some better details in the content dreation below that I don't cover in the video. 

The Project

I took this narrative as the basis to evolve the story and expanded the prose and wanted to print it in the more simple and economical form of a 6" x 9"trade book. The text is not very long and I liked the format for my previous story. While working on the book I was deciding if it should be just text or feature photos. A part of the story and landscape are the photos my brother took on that trip.

The trade book I don't think prints a high enough quality of photo and even Blurb's more expensive formats and paper I find highly variable in terms of image quality. I am never one to shy away from making a project more complicated and so I decided to 'pimp' the trade book.

I decided I should mount C-Type prints (color photographic prints) in the book. The typical problem with mounting photos or plates are two-fold. First they increase the thickness of the book and so the thickness of the book does not match the spine. Second they should be protected from abrasion from the facing page. Glassine is a special semi-transparent paper that is smooth and very thin. The thinness means if take less thickness than the 80 GSM paper used by Blurb thus making a allowance for the extra thickness of the photo. Since it is smooth and glossy it is less abrasive.

The way this is accomplished in book binding is to insert a blank page between the photo page and the facing page. This page is then cut away near the spine. This makes sure that the binding accounts for the thickness of the photo when it is later mounted to the page. On the stub of cut page left near the spine one can now glue a sheet of glassine which is a smooth transparent sheet to protect the photo.

Trust me this makes the whole project much less straightforward. In addition to the work of cutting away blank pages and gluing glassine in its place, the creation of the book is complicated by the placement of these blank pages. I use Word to create the text pages and I find it very tedious and complicated to insert these pages in the right place and make sure the page numbers and headings and footings come out right across these blank pages. I will try to provide some tips further down in this entry for those interested in how I achieved it.

Prototype Photo Mounting

My first step was to prepare a prototype book, print it through Blurb then perform the glassine and photo mounting steps to confirm to myself I understood the mechanics of assembling the book. The prototype is the entire text with a few photos inserted with their corresponding blank pages. The cost of the book was about $5 and but the shipping was about $9!

Here is the cover of the prototype book. 

Because I wanted the book to work as a book straight from the printer, as well as with the glassine and mounted photos in place, I placed black and white versions of the same photos in the same size and location as the color prints would be mounted. These made good place holders. The blank pages I labelled 'Glassine Page' and made a note at the beginning of the book to explain their presence.

Example 'Glassine' blank page as it comes from the printer

Other side of blank page with photo on facing page

The first step in cutting away this blank page is to place behind it something to protect the next page from getting cut. I used a piece of thin cardboard as shown below.

Cardboard on right side tucked against spine to protect next page. 

The I flip the blank page over the cardboard.

Blank page flipped over cardboard.

I then take my straightedge and line it up to cut a straight line near the spine. I leave about 1 or 1.5cm of paper to glue the glassine to. For this example I rotate the book upside down to make using the knife along the straightedge easier.

Straightedge positioned for the cut. (Book rotated)

I then simply cut along the straightedge with a scalpel or Exacto knife.

Blank page now cut so facing pages can bee seen and small strip of paper left near spine.

Next I cut a piece of glassine slightly larger than the page. (As I made more of these pages I found it much easier to cut the glassine sheets to slightly smaller than the size of the pages.)

Loose glassine cut for the page.

Next I use Scotch PMA mounting adhesive. Of all the means of mounting this is the least fussy in my view though it still requires some care to not make a mess. I cut a strip of the PMA adhesive slightly narrower than the paper left protruding from the spine. I then place the release paper behind this paper strip pressed into the spine as far as it will go.

Release paper in place and PMA strip lying ready to apply to paper strip at the spine.

The release paper will keep stray adhesive from marring the printed page. I then press the PMA strip onto the paper strip near the spine and then use the rubbing tool to ensure it is well adhered. Next I peel the backing paper from the PMA strip leaving the PMA adhesive on the paper strip ready to take the glassine. I carefully put the glassine onto the PMA and then rub this again to ensure full adhesion.

Glassine glued in place

Now I carefully trim the glassine to the edges of the page with my knife. Then I mount my photo in the same place as the black and white photo on the printed page. Again I use Scotch PMA for this job as well. (Some may notice the printed photo is different then the C-type print I mounted over it. This was a lack of coordination in the prints I ordered. Not really a problem as this is a throw-away prototype.)

Mounted photo seen through trimmed glassine.

Glassine reveal of mounted print. Note text on left side visible through glassine.

This proved the methodology was sound and I could proceed in earnest with the project.

Making the Prints

The other part of the project is to make the prints. The square (Hasselblad) prints I decided would be 4x4 inches to fit the page horizontally, the 35mm prints would be 4 x 2.5 inches. In both cases I settled on a 1/8 inch boarder. Looking at Peak Imaging's website the closest print size is 4x5 inches. This meant some trimming work to get them to size. They are 82 pence each.

I had scanned the photos when I did the original blog post but I have subsequently gotten better at getting the best color out of scans so I re-processed the scans.

I worked out that in Photoshop (Elements) I  could import all the prospective photos as layers. Before importing they were cropped to dimension (3.75x3.75 for the 4x4 prints for instance with 1/8 inch .125 on each border) and set for the same DPI (600dpi). These are then copied as a layer to the template I made as described below.

I then made a blank template of 4x5 inches at 600 dpi to import the photos into. I set guides for the 1/8 inch borders. I then made small marks (using + sign in text) to mark where the prints would have to be trimmed to. Since I had two sizes (4x4 and 4x2.5) I had different sets of marks that were on different layers. By enabling the right layers I could build my image up. As I copy in new images as above I just add more layers to this template.

Finally I added a hue/saturation adjustment layer that I set to no saturation (making the image black and white). This allowed me to make black and white versions for the printed pages by turning on this layer.

Photoshop with different layers shown on right. 

Making a photo for the lab is as simple as making visible the image layers I want, then the marking text layers and finally making visible or invisible the saturation layer depending on if I want black and white or color. Once I have the image I want I save it as a JPEG file which sums up the visible layers to one JPEG file. The original template with all the images as layers is saved separately as a PSD file.

4x4 inch print as it comes form the lab. Note trim marks to the right of photo.

4x2.5 inch print as it comes form the lab. Note trim marks to the right and bottom of photo.

Creating the Glassine Pages in Word

This a very intricate part of the endeavor. Each glassine page I was determined to be as unobtrusive as possible in the case where the book was merely published and not modified with the glassine sheets or photos mounted in the book. Also since in the intended case the pages would be cut away this had implications in the formatting of the remaining headers and footers.

I chose to have the title and sub-title on the header and the page numbers on the footer. The glassine pages could not have them. This meant I needed to be able to delete them for the glassine pages and resume them for subsequent pages until there was the need to insert another glassine page.

Sections

The way this is achieved is to insert section breaks in Word at the start and end of each glassine page. Section breaks allow differing header and footer formatting. I would insert a section break at the end of the page before the glassine page, then insert 2 new pages (each page is one side of the paper the glassine page represents) then another section header.

If you double click into the header and footer then the section number is shown and one can see the glassine pages have a different section number from the previous pages and the latter pages. Next you need to turn off 'Link to Previous' in the header/footer command tab. This prevents changes from being copied from the previous section. This also needs to be done in the section following the glassine pages. Now you can select and delete the  header and footer for the glassine pages section. This should leave a clean pair of pages. (You can use the show/hide paragraph mode in the Home tab to expose where the section and page breaks are. This is useful for deleting page and section breaks as well.)

I chose to paste in a text box that says 'Glassine Page' in light grey text to indicate the purpose of the page. This of course is optional and a matter of style.

Page Numbers

In the section that follows the glassine pages one needs to restart the page numbers. This is done in the header/footer table with the Page Number dialog and look for 'Format Page Numbers'.  There is an option to 'Start at...' a new page number. Select this and type in the next page from the previous page numbers.

The other complexity for me is that the each 'page' in Word is of course only half of one sheet of paper in the book. This means 2 Word pages are one physical page. In Blurb the first pages will need to be separate sections as you need to make a title page and a publisher page and then a dedication page. The page numbering does not start until after this so the actual text section needs to be on a separate section so it can have unique headers/footers and page number etc.

In my Blurb version the first page is actual opposite the back of the cover. So while it appears in a 2 page spread in Word on the left-hand page it will actually be on the right hand side in the book. This is the start of the paging confusion.

It is useful to submit the PDF to Blurb early and often to use the book preview function to orient yourself to the page ordering. The book preview also binds two pages together that share the same sheet of paper. For me the odd page numbers should be on the left page in two page viewing mode in Word.  I then flip two pages at a time to stay in sync with the final book layout. If I have both glassine pages visible on left and right following this 2 page-at-a-time flip method I know I have gotten things out of sync and need to move the glassine pages.

I had to make many PDF versions to look at in the Blurb book preview in order to get this right. Blurb will send an email for each instance and also create a new entry on your dashboard all of which need to be deleted to keep things tidy.

Top Tips...

• Make your text and story edits long before you get into adding photos and pages as described above. 
• Plan and insert all the photos you plan to use. 
• The above two actions can change where page breaks occur and so will make the glassine pages move to separate physical pages resulting in more work.
• The actions of creating these glassine pages should be done as close as possible after the final edits.