How to make your own book || Tutorial

 Back in January I shared a book that Jude and I made together. I gave a little explanation of how I put the book together, but nothing super detailed. Since I have gotten a few emails asking questions I thought I would put together a step by step tutorial for how I created the book, including where we got it printed, and showing you the second book we made.

 It was a lot of fun having Abbey be a part and after the first one Abbey insisted that she be a part of one too. The first book was written by Jude, this one was written by me as I wrote down quotes and story lines of their imaginative play one day. So here is how I did it:

 I have a mini studio set up in my sewing studio that I use but you don’t need a studio to make this possible. All you need is a white background. I use white seamless paper backdrop that I picked up at a local camera shop, it’s a large roll of card stock thick paper, I use this since it’s wrinkle free and white.
Why white? If you photograph in front of white then the pixels outlining the subject will be light and solid. So when the background is all erased they will blend into the white background of the book seamlessly. As you can see from the original picture the whole picture does not need to be white. All you need is good lighting and a smooth light background and it will be easy to edit. You can also see the fan off to the side, I used that to get a little “wind” so it would look more real.

 Next. Create a new page you want it to be the size of the page you want for your book.
Mine was about 25″X16″ and 240 dpi (high resolution is good for printing) Then copy the photo and paste it on to the blank page. You want the photo to be a second layer.

 Then use the eraser tool and erase all the background around the subject. Depending on how white your background was it will depend on how close you need to clean it up.

 For the drawings I had Jude draw on regular white printer paper. Be sure to draw as dark as possible. Then I scanned the images into the computer. They scan a little lighter than I wanted so first I opened the drawing up and adjusted the brightness and contrast to boost it up a bit.

 Then I copied and pasted the drawing on to the same book page as the picture. I placed the drawing layer behind the photo. As you can see the proportions were not quite right as Jude was way too big for the boat.

 Using the “free transform” I adjusted each layer to make the proportions right.

 Then since I wanted Jude to be standing in the boat I used the eraser tool to erase the picture layer, simply erasing the bottom of his feet so he would be “behind” the front of the boat.

 You can add more layers, combine photos and drawings until you have the scene you want. Then add text to the page and you are done. Continue making pages until you complete your book. Make sure each page is the same size.

For printing. I used Blurb.com
I have used blurb to make instagram books before and I liked the quality of the books so I thought I would give them a try with these books. I LOVE the way it turned out. Great print quality the pictures were crystal clear and great page quality. I went with the soft cover book.

Pros:
Great Quality
Quick Turnaround
No minimum order

Cons:
You have to have at least 20 pages

(yep literally the only complaint I have is that it’s hard to fill 20 pages. We combined both stories to make it)