UPDATED: iPhoto More Than Just an Image Browser – It Moonlights As One of Santa’s Elves!

I have an update to the short self-publishing piece I wrote this past December. My first calendars did arrive in time for gift-giving and they were a big hit! I only ordered a handful in the first batch but they were worth the effort and the (slight) shipping charges.
In January I put my efforts into creating my first book, which I completed and titled “One.”

It is all in black and white and my homage to the original master Ansel Adams, a dominant inspiration of mine. I am very pleased with the quality of the book and with my experiences with publishing in iPhoto overall. The printing company Apple uses has done an excellent job on both my calendars and the book and I will not hesitate to use them again in the future.

They are not, of course, the only game in town. Far from it. Self-publishing has become quite the little (digital) cottage industry and a quick search on a search engine will deliver many results for you to browse.

Since Christmas, the Apple App Store has come online and I took advantage of a few download special offers. Several new image-related software programs now reside on my computer at home, some similar to apps on my iPhone and discovered a Mac OSX version for use on my high-res images for publishing.

So yes, another book (“Two” obviously) will be in the works shortly. Not exactly certain as to the content or theme but as soon as inspiration comes my way I will be busy burning more midnight oil.

Here is that first article in this series:
I read an article recently about self-publishing photo books. I have quite an archive of images on slides, black and white and color negative film and digital. My collection spans more than 25 years professionally and I even have some images I shot as a youth. The article got me to thinking about perhaps sitting down and pulling some of my best work and putting together a photo book that I could be proud to display or give as gifts.

My usual holiday procrastination for gift shopping led me to find a note on the Apple website that states if I submit a book order by Dec. 23 it will ship by Christmas. I don’t have time to sit down and dig through the archives for a book but I did see that Apple offers other photo gift ideas, one being a calendar.

Hey, we give calendars as holiday gifts so why not personalize one with some of my best images I have right here on my hard drive?
After about eight or nine hours in front of my iMac (sorting through and choosing the images took forever) I have submitted my order to Apple and requested the express shipping. Using the prebuilt templates in iPhoto was a breeze.
We will see if they actually arrive in time to hand out on Saturday but what a cool idea and a great alternative to the usual gift card. All these years I have had iPhoto on my computer and I never looked down to see the alternate publication possibilities the program was capable of.

If the calendars do not arrive in time to hand out on Christmas, well, that is what I get for waiting so long. And if they do arrive then perhaps, Virginia, there really is a Santa Claus (and he has a workshop in Cupertino, California).

Technically speaking
Images for both the book and calendar were edited in iPhoto. For my monochrome images I used the black and white effect and then utilized several of the functions in the adjust menu. While basic when compared to other image editing software available today I found most of these controls performed the tasks at hand quite well.

All edits were done on copies of the original digital files so that the original would not accidentally be altered. I believe all of the digital images used were recorded originally as jpeg files with little compression. None of the photos were extremely high in resolution but they all reproduced on slick glossy pages beautifully.