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I’ve been a fan of aperture’s book tool for a long time. Here are some of the main reasons:

  1. Designing well thought out spreads takes a long time. Aperture is the only application where I can easily switch between the “design process” and the “editorial process” while building a book. A well designed book takes just as much effort finding the right images as the effort to make those images look their best. My process is to build my albums around “a story” and more often than not the images that go in the book aren’t always the five star images. The ability to adjust images directly within the layout at any point in the design process is somewhat revolutionary.
  2. “Smart guides” make custom layouts easy to build quickly while maintaining balance in the design.
  3. In my experience, the current generation of wedding couples seem drawn to the end-product of a storybook style album more than the traditional cardboard page/leather bound album of old. This is good for both of us, because these books will be taken places and shown to people… Whereas traditional albums seem to never make it out of the owner’s house…

There are a lot of online book providers, and Aperture’s current price point is a little bit on the higher end of the market for “one-off” digitally printed books… So how is the quality? In a word, AMAZING. The detail retention, tonal accuracy in the red channel, ability to cover shadow detail while still providing accurate contrast… I can’t say enough about how good these books look in person, and at this price point I have more clients choosing these over “formal” albums. If you’d like to take a peek at the full book before reading the review, you can preview a digital version of it here.

Note: If you are currently considering “switching to aperture” and are a working photographer in my area, you can skip the rest of this post – the aperture book tool is VERY LIMITED and you really shouldn’t waste your time with it! InDesign is a much more powerful layout program, so use that :-) Or keep using those custom PSD templates from your current book printer… I mean photoshop IS the standard for a reason! Just don’t forget to add some room for bleed… Also don’t forget to do some output-targeted high pass sharpening techniques… Now switch back to your favorite file-system based image browser and find the best shot to drop in to your next template. (HINT: It’s inside the folder called “edited”).

Review

Up until now, the only drawback with the aperture book service has been size. This becomes an issue when you have really good portrait length shots and need to squeeze them down into an 8″ tall page… When aperture 3 was released, luckily I was half way through a book project in aperture 2 – so I immediately called my client and said “Your book is going to take a little bit longer… But I’m going to give you a size upgrade for free!”

Since my layouts were all custom, I needed to rebuild them in the new 13×10 size. This went fairly quickly as I took screenshots of the book thumbnails in aperture 2, and had them open in preview on the side while I rebuilt the layouts in a 13×10 version of the book.

Note: If any aperture engineers happen to read this, I would really appreciate a feature that lets the user choose to perform an automatic “proportional” layout change when changing book sizes. It is somewhat of a bummer right now when my clients want to order differently sized books, and I need to completely re-do the book in a different size for that to happen…

I placed the order on a Saturday, and received the book that week on Wednesday – not bad at all for the standard shipping. The new aperture 3 book order dialog lets you generate a PDF to preview before you go through the checkout process which is nice – note that the PDF generation takes a while.

Now… onto the results! disclaimer: These shots were taken with available light and a 50mm non-macro lens at f/4 – 1/30 of a second… So they aren’t critically sharp, and not everything is within the DOF plane. There’s also varying glare from the right that shifts the color to a cool balance, and a warm light source on the left. I’m presenting these photos to just give an idea of what to expect, there might be a mild tint or color shift in the photos that isn’t there in real life.

First impressions

This book is HUGE. I didn’t really think of this until the book arrived, but when fully open you are essentially holding a 25″ wide by 10″ tall print in front of you, and the effect is stunning. You can put four approximately 8×10 sized pictures (after matting) on one spread! To give you some context, here are a few shots from a point of view perspective –

The Cover

The new hardcover books print directly onto the cover, as well as including a removable dust jacket. I’m not sure if this is limited to the 13×10 books or not. The print quality on both is very good, with the dust jacket having slightly better sharpness and a more neutral grayscale balance. The book cover itself printed a little bit warmer than the dust jacket, but the effect has been amplified a little bit in my mixed available light photo below. I should note that you can print the cover in color if you wish, but I prefer to print my covers in black and white so that they won’t clash with the environment they end up in (someone else’s living room). The inside of the hard cover is a neutral textured paper that looks a little bit like “brushed metal”. I would prefer Vellum here, but it’s not terrible – It does a good job of preventing scuffing on the inside pages.

Print Quality… Two words – Adobe RGB!

Update 3/19/10 – From a post on the apple discussion forums, another member mentioned that Apple staff confirmed the books were printed in a wide gamut Adobe RGB color space. I double checked the generated PDF in Acrobat, and can confirm that the books are indeed sent off in an Adobe RGB colorspace. This explains why I was so amazed at the tonal range in the skin tones and red channel.

Hands-down this is the best WYSIWYG experience I’ve ever had. I use a calibrated HP LP2475w as my main monitor and the images in the book are incredibly accurate to my original intent on screen. The tonal range in the skin tones is perfect, and the prints have just the right amount of contrast to look vibrant but not over-processed (Some of the images below are from a very colorful outdoor summer wedding, so they are intentionally a little more vibrant). The pages have a nice semi-gloss sheen on them, and the dot pattern is not visible unless you look up close. I’m actually quite shocked the printed book is technically within the sRGB color space, there isn’t an ounce of “sRGB muddiness” here! :-)

Things to watch out for

Don’t forget about the gutter! I really wish the aperture Book UI had a “gutter preview” tool, but it doesn’t. If you’ve got a nice spread with images centered in the page, I recommend you leave about  3/4″ of margin on the gutter side to compensate for the “visual cutoff” of the page as it curls into the binding. In my layouts, I shifted non-bleed images about 3/8″ away from the gutter, and it still wasn’t enough. (You can see this in some of the spreads above).

This isn’t a deal-breaker, but if you are particular about your layouts, it is something to be aware of. If you look at the picture below, you can see how the three images on the left would be more evenly balanced if they were shifted over to the left about 1/2 an inch.

Conclusion

For me, it’s a no-brainer. Right now aperture’s combination of workflow and results for the cost can’t be beat. The Apple print services no questions asked guarantee is also quite astounding. A year ago, I had one book arrive with the printing registration off on a few pages. I filled out a form, and a new book was sent to me in 2 days, no questions asked. If you’ve been hesitant to try the book service, it really is a no-risk option and I highly recommend it.

Hopefully this quick review has been helpful to you. I’d love to hear what others have to say about their book experiences, and I’d be happy to answer any specific questions in the comments below. If you’d like to see a digital version of this Book in it’s entirety, you can view a digital version of it here.