While I was up in Scotland a few weeks ago, a Company called Saal Digital - https://www.saal-digital.co.uk/ granted me a £100 credit to compile a Photobook, I had never used these guys before and it had been ages since I had compiled a photobook, literally years, so I decided to give them a go as their products looked very good.
Outer Cover
Saal market themselves as a ‘high end quality’ producer of Photobooks, so with this is mind I set about the task of picking the images I wanted to see in a book from my Portfolio.
For anyone who’s ever done this who has a sizeable boody of work, you will know this isn’t an easy task, but it is fun looking back through your catalogue of shots, selecting a load of images, and then gradually whittling them down to the ones you are going to use.
I started off with a 30 page book (you can add or subtract pages easily as you go along), needless to say that 30 just was not going to cut it as I had built up that much material I wasn’t prepared to leave certain images out of the selection, so I ended up with double what I started out with - 60 pages…
I have to say I was really impressed with their website as there were to hand tutorials for the creation of the book everywhere, they do make the process really easy for you, which is what you want when you are doing this, no coming up against brick walls so to speak. You download their software onto your PC and create the book within that, saving as you go along, until you are finished and upload to the checkout basket, simples.
Really well bound, and quality leather outer
Once I had my photo’s selected I do what I always do before printing and made sure all the images were converted to SRGB colour space, then I brightened each one slighty (1.2 gamma correction setting in Photoshop - image - adjustments- exposure) to compensate for the backlit monitor I was viewing the images on.
I opted for High End Matte Paper and a Black Leather cover… uploaded, paid, and that was that.
A few days later the book arrived and I have to say I’m absolutely over the moon with it! The quality of the book as soon as you take it out of the wrapper is evident, nice to touch, the paper inside is more like a thick card that the pictures really look good on, the colour rendition is great, and the printing is superb, basically the images look EXACTLY how I want them to look. I’d have absolutely no problem presenting this to a gallery or client to display my work.
Setting B/W off with a black background looks great on this paper
East to resize images to fit your page - (the colours are a lot better in the flesh)
Slight shadow under the image make it really stand out on the page
These books really are good quality, and look amazing, there are much cheaper options out there, but as that saying goes - you get what you pay for, and here that is certainly true.
Overall, would I use them again? Absolutely,
https://www.saal-digital.co.uk/
©PeteRowbottom2020