mutelife

On June 4, Lena and I took a few minutes to go through our most recent photos and quickly draft up a photo book to test Blurb’s ProLine out for an upcoming project. A week after, it arrived and I must say I’m very impressed.

I’ve wanted to test Blurb out for a while and having just seen QOOP products in person before, I wasn’t keen on taking the plunge to waste money on something I didn’t believe in. I even considered Apple’s Aperture books but when Blurb’s ProLine came into the picture the decision was made.

We specifically wanted to be able to print in matte paper, slightly textured, with a good basis weight, and ProLine Uncoated was the absolute winner. They use Mohawk’s Superfine Eggshell Ultrawhite and you can read the specs more in detail here.

When we picked out a few photos from the bunch, we got this out of the door in just under half an hour — all without even leaving Lightroom. But it’s also good to know Blurb has an InDesign plugin which is perfectly integrated into the workflow, capable of delivering some real potential for serious projects.

For this particular book — an assumed test from the start — we picked the softcover and went for the minimum amount of pages to keep the cost on the low side. The cover is a bit distracting — it has a glossy finish while the pages are uncoated — but the inside is just pure sexiness, as you can see by the photos.

Blurb has a printing facility in The Netherlands which made production + shipping really fast; it was a breeze to use their services and I can’t wait to get started on the real project with great photos and try some stuff on the editorial design side of things — stay tuned!