5 Replies Latest reply: Feb 27, 2012 4:04 AM by jtbikeguy RSS

    Upload to Blurb - Preview Fault

    99jon Community Member
    99jon Feb 4, 2012 5:52 AM

       

      I spent a great deal of time designing my first book and uploaded it to Blurb successfully. I got the following message; so all seemed fine.

       

      Created with Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 4
      February 02, 2012 at 01:33 am

       

      You have 15 days to order your book. Not ready to order? That’s OK. You can upload another version of your PDF whenever you’re ready.

       

      My question - what exactly is being uploaded? Several of my pages contained background graphics e.g. from the travel templates and I used a nice one with gray stripes to show off a couple of black and white images. But when I preview the book on the Blurb site, all the pages are white.

       

      Are the background templates contained on layers? Have they been lost during upload? Perhaps this is a bug?

       

      I realize this is Beta software but I wanted to do a test print before buying LR4. Has anyone been successful in printing a book as designed in LR4B?

       

       

       

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        • 1. Re: Upload to Blurb - Preview Fault
          99jon Community Member
          99jon Feb 9, 2012 10:22 AM (in response to 99jon)

           

          I deleted my first book from Blurb. I’ve uploaded a second with a variety of page backgrounds, for further testing. There is certainly no problem uploading to my Blurb account.

           

          The problem only occurs with the graphic pre-sets. So at present the travel and wedding backgrounds are not useable.

           

          There are no problems when the background is a solid color or a photo image dragged in as a background, with an opacity setting.

           

          I was able to replicate the striped background I wanted to use in Photoshop but had to save the template as a psd file, import it into the library, add it to my book collection and then drag that PSD into the book as a page background. Whilst this is a workaround it is at variance with the comments of Adobe’s employee LR_Kevin who stressed the design aspects of the background templates and their importance in matching the page size and resolution, determined by the book type selected.

           

          For further investigation, I saved my book as a PDF file and then opened the individual pages in Photoshop. Those pages containing the template graphics all showed the photo on a transparent layer and it was necessary to flatten the image, for the graphic to be visible. So the fault appears to be with the way the print PFD is being generated for upload to Blurb. I suspect the layer background is always white and that the file is not being flattened on export, so only the image layer is sent to Blurb and the white background affects pages with any other color.

           

          It would be cool to get some acknowledgement that this issue is being looked at. Perhaps some liaison with the Blurb team is necessary to establish how the background templates work effectively in BookSmart but not in LR.

           

          Hope you guys can get it fixed before final release otherwise the workflow is impossibly long winded.

           

           

           

           

          • 2. Re: Upload to Blurb - Preview Fault
            Victoria Bampton CommunityMVP
            Victoria Bampton Feb 9, 2012 1:06 PM (in response to 99jon)

            I've got a bug which I think may be related.  I'll put this thread in the notes for reference.

            • 3. Re: Upload to Blurb - Preview Fault
              99jon Community Member
              99jon Feb 9, 2012 2:07 PM (in response to Victoria Bampton)

              Thanks Victoria.

              • 4. Re: Upload to Blurb - Preview Fault
                chelseafc4life Community Member
                chelseafc4life Feb 26, 2012 3:10 PM (in response to 99jon)

                I have the same issue with backgrounds not showing up in Blurb - but something I've noticed is that after uploading, they are visible if I look at the page spread preview on Blurb (i.e. the view which shows all your pages at once) but not visible in the full page spread views. Perhaps something to consider?

                 

                I've not yet ordered one to see the results, may wait until after LR4 is fully released for that.

                • 5. Re: Upload to Blurb - Preview Fault
                  jtbikeguy Community Member
                  jtbikeguy Feb 27, 2012 4:04 AM (in response to chelseafc4life)

                  I discussed this issue in an earlier string after uploading a book to Blurb and seeing that b/g was white on all pages.  I contacted blurb and inquired about that immediately after previewing the book on their site.  They had me take a screen shot of my design in LR4 and a screen shot of the same page on their site and email them for review.  There response was that the backgrounds were correct in the upload but do not show on their site preview.  They are working to correct that.  In the meantime, I'm sure they're getting a lot of flack and perhap canceled orders because of it.  Had they not replied very quickly I would have canceled my book.