My Photo Creations - Features

Tips


1. Designing pages in Adobe Photoshop® to be used with the My Photo Creations software






1. Designing pages in Adobe Photoshop® to be used with the My Photo Creations software


If you plan to design some or all of your pages in Adobe Photoshop®, there are a few more things you need to know:


Bleed – when one or more sides of a printed image touch the edge of the paper. The use of bleed guarantees that the finished (cropped) page will look neat & precise. The page bleed allowance should be 1/4 inch at all four sides of the page. The bleed area (i.e. beyond the crop marks) will be trimmed off. If you use a background color or image, it should fill the entire page including the bleed area. For example, if your printed page size is 8.5 inch wide, your page design should be 9 inch wide with the bleed (1/4” + 8.5” + 1/4”).


Two Page Spread – this is a page design than spans both right & left-hand pages. The pages are centered at the gutter where they are bound into the spine. Approximately 1/4" of the spread will be bound into (and thus hidden within) the spine. This, in of itself, is not a problem, but it does require a bit of special attention when using an external tool, such as Adobe Photoshop to create your page designs:


Be sure to leave bleed on all 4 sides. The My Photo Books software will automatically adjust any background used as if it has a bleed designed into it.


Keep important design details at least 3/8” from all sides of the page so that unwelcome trimming does not occur.


Keep important design details an extra 1/4" away from the center binding (this is in addition to the bleed you leave on all 4 sides of the page). This is an issue specifically for single page designs.


The software will adjust the spread pages for the 1/4" lost within the spine. To this end, the spread should be designed to be 1/4" smaller than the size that it would be if you were to include the gutter. Also, keep in mind that although page spreads are well suited for panoramic picture backgrounds, fine details may be partially obscured within the binding.