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All posts tagged "picaboo"


Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Photo Book Luxury: Picaboo's Ranch Style Book Reviewed

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Printing" @ 07:00 AM

Product Category: Photo book
Where to Buy: Picaboo
Price: Starts at $299.99 USD (8.5 x 11") or $199.99 USD (6" x 8"); as configured in this review, $539 USD.
System Requirements: Picaboo X is an Adobe Air application that will work on Windows or OS X.

Pros:

  • Easy to use book-building application with lots of extras;
  • The Ranch book style is beautiful from start to finish;
  • Picaboo provides excellent customer service.

Cons:

  • Picaboo books tend to be expensive relative to other book printing companies, though this is mitigated somewhat via regular promotions;
  • Picaboo X has some stability and usability issues;
  • Picaboo X is not well-suited to computers with a weak CPU, and isn't multi-threaded.

Summary: The last time I wrote about Picaboo, it was as part of my mega photo book review - and they didn't fare very well. I was contacted by someone from Picaboo's marketing department shortly after the review went live, and they were gracious about the issues I pointed out with their system and final product. They offered me a chance to try one of their higher-end books, and to review their new Picaboo X software. I had a personal project in mind that would be perfect for this type of book, so I figured I'd give them another shot. How did they do? Keep reading to find out.

Note: This review was written prior to the 10.124P version of the software that adds in the very clever BookGenie option, so that feature isn't discussed. Read more...


Tuesday, April 6, 2010

The Great Photo Book Round-Up Review: Who Makes The Best Photo Books?

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Printing" @ 06:30 AM

Photo Book Review

This review has been updated as of July 2014. Short on time? Skip to the conclusion, or do what I do: sign up for discounts from Photobook America and MyPublisher. Both are superb choices!

Looking for the 20% discount on FotoFusion? Use code DHT20-2 on the Lumapix site.

My son Logan was born on August 16th, 2009, but long before that I started work on a very special project: a baby book that would chronicle the process of my wife's pregnancy, our preparations for his arrival, and the first couple of weeks after he was born. This wasn't going to simply be a bunch of photos; I wanted to create a truly epic baby book, something that was off-the-charts unique and something that would become a family treasure.

I've wanted to use FotoFusion (see below for a discount coupon) to create customized page layouts for a long time now, because I knew it would allow me to break the limited confines of what typical photo book software permitted. I had carefully created all the pages in FotoFusion, exported each page as a high-resolution JPEG file, and dropped the images into full-page layouts. I incorporated my green-screen scanning technique to add objects to the book, and once I was finished - a process that took eight months of work and around 200 hours in total because I wanted it to be perfect - I had the book printed with Picaboo. The results were a complete disaster. The details are below under the review section for Picaboo, but the short version is that I was really unhappy with the physical representation of all my hard work and I wanted to get the books re-printed using a different service. But which service should I use?

Read more...


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