Book module advanced help
DVDmike Mar 11, 2012 8:20 AMI have watched the videos for the book module and while it does a lot of great things, either I am misunderstanding what is available or I am not sure that this module is really geared for professionals who make their income preparing books.
First off, I use a couple of different book companies, main GraphiStudio for my books. And I do not use Blurb. While I am sure Blurb is nice, I do not have a large sample set of Blurb books to show my customers. I do have many Graphi books and for me to switch would be extremely costly to create enough samples to sell to clients. It is just out of the question.
Can you export the pages of a book to .psd files? From what I see, it looks like we have two choices, either use blurb, or export to a .pdf. How about exporting to .jpg files? How hard could this be to do? If I cannot export to a high resolution image format, it is useless to me. Really, I would prefer to be able to export each page or spread as a .psd with all of the effects as editable layers in Photoshop and the images being placed into the .psd files as smart objects. This way, you could use the advanced features of quickly creating an album in LR and yet have the flexibility to make finishing touches in Photoshop. These finishing touches wouldn't need to be viewable in the book module if that makes it easier. Once I have them as .psd files, I do not need the book module to make adjustments.
For Graphi books, the first printable page is the left side of a two page spread. There is never a single page at the start or end of a book. How can I make the first and all odd numbered pages be left side pages of two-page spreads? Is this possible? If not, this book module is useless to me.
Lastly, the sizes of books are an issue. Can you customize the size of your book? I could easily enter in all of the data that makes up the page size for a graphi or other manufacture's book. It would seem a no-brainier to allow custom sizes for a professional photo application that allows for bookmaking. So what if the templates do not match up exactly to every size. You basically have square, landscaped, and portrait oriented templates. It should be easy to fit the right template into a custom sized book.
Adobe obviously spent a lot of time adding a lot of features to this book module. But it appears that these features are more cosumer oriented than professional oriented if you cannot output pages as files that you can edit in another application and you cannot specify your page size. Perhaps I just have not figured out how to do these things and if someone knows how, please enlighten me. Until these options are added or someone tells me how to get around them, I am quite underwhelmedwith what Adobe has come up with for this book module.




