Online course explains how to plan, organize and publish a photo book on Blurb.com

Lynda.com Creating Photo Books with Blurb, showing book cover design

Self-publishing a book is a daunting task made relatively easy with the Lynda,com course Creating Photo Books with Blurb.

For example, if you want to create a really special Valentine’s Day photo book covered in How to make the best Valentine for under $50, the related Lynda course takes about 2 to 3 hours to complete and costs $25, or $37.50 if you use their sample files. The fee is a one month membership and you can also take other courses during the month. There also is a Lynda.com 7-day free trial.

Creating Photo Books with Blurb explains how to plan the book, organize and edit photos, layout the pages and publish. The advantage it has over the Blurb.com tutorials is the presenter filled each lesson with tips and techniques. The various options are explained. The best choices are illustrated along with alternative results. Taking the course provides the information you need and confidence to create a stunning book.

There are three tracks to creating a Blurb photo book – Booksmart, Bookify, and PDF to Book. Booksmart is free software that helps you organize the book. Bookify is the simpler online book creation software with more limited choices in layout and features. PDF to Book is for professional designers who use Adobe InDesign. This is explained clearly so I could quickly decide the best route to take.

I chose Booksmart after the trainer explained when to use the different tracks. The course helped me by showing how to use software I already had (Adobe Bridge and Photoshop) to organize, edit and prepare the photos. The tips saved hours of frustration. When I was ready the pictures were automatically input into Booksmart in the page order I wanted.Then I could re-arrange them after checking out how the book looked in Preview.

Along with Photoshop, there were lessons on using standard photo editing software such as Lightroom and iPhoto.  The general principles would apply to any software – good color, in focus, large enough to look good printed and cropped to exclude extraneous material – like shots of the ex. Technical details to learn like 300 dpi and color management are also explained. What you see on the monitor isn’t how they look printed.

About half of the course is specific to the different tracks and photo editing software. You can fast track and skip what you don’t need.  For instance, I don’t use InDesign or iPhoto so it wasn’t necessary to cover those sections. I went back after my book was in production to briefly review the other material. While interesting, they weren’t important in learning on a Booksmart with Photoshop track. The course gives practical tips on using Adobe Bridge which is a valuable tool for organizing media files, something that I didn’t appreciate before.

Lynda.com

I didn’t even know about Blurb.com self-publishing until Lynda.com sent me an email about the course in November. I clicked on the link, started the course and decided to make a bound photo book of the last decade for my family.

The result was a 180 page bound book that everyone couldn’t wait to see at Christmas.

I discovered Lynda.com courses when I was trying to learn Adobe CS5 in 2010. Adobe and Photoshop courses are their specialty.

A year later, I converted to an annual subscription since there are so many courses beyond Adobe such as HTML 5, design, developer, and business.

For example, last summer I took the course Creating an Effective Resume to help a friend. The course took a new approach I hadn’t seen before. The resume got her a job within a week after we followed the course suggestions.

Recently they started a series on audio recording techniques which I started. I was learning new things within the hour, despite years of audio recording experience.

Businesses spend money on technology that employees only partially learn. There is little if any productivity gain when staff don’t use the software fully. In the past,I spent tens of thousands of dollars on computer training for employees . Things have changed. Now you can buy better courses for less than $500 a year.

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