Mpix Blog

I just received my first Mpix Press book and I was very pleased with the picture quality and, as always, the turn around was FANTASTIC.

Where I was less than pleased was the 2-page spread feature. The Photo Book software allows one to drop a photo as a full bleed page. When you do that, you get a choice of single page or two-page spread. No problem there. When you preview the book before ordering, you can see that the software tries to compensate for the gutter by duplicating some of the  picture in the middle of the pages. I figured that would do the trick. Unfortunately, the gutter is much larger than the software compensates for and I lost about 1/4 inch of each page in the middle of the spreads. Not a big deal for landscapes, but I had two pages where people lost major body parts.

I wish you would either let people know of the issue of design a larger compensation factor into your layout software.

Hi "Dad with Nikon",

I'm new to the Mpix site, and I am currently putting together a book of my own, so I am no pro.   But I remember reading somewhere (maybe tips and tricks) that they recommend that you do NOT place people in the center of the frame where the gutter will be because of that cut off problem.  I would guess that even if they didn't actually cut off 1/4" that it would still look funny because the person's body would appear a bit warped as it "sloped" down into the gutter and back out on the other page.

I am also no pro at Photoshop, but somewhere I read guidelines in the Mpix site about what measurements to use in Photoshop to create an overlap in the middle so when they chop part of the image away, you end up with a clean transition.

I hope this helps.  I am putting a few 2 page spreads into my book, but I am using only travel landscapes to show where we were on our trip.

BTW.....what megapixel image did you spread across 2 pages, and did it print sharp??  I am putting a 6MP image across 2 pages of an 8x11 book and when I do the math the dpi seems to be less than they recommend, although the "Preflight" check doesn't warn about it.

Thanks and good luck.