Thursday, November 22, 2007

No photo book on Blurb.com and here is why

Hello

Some of you had noticed that I was planning to create a 160 pages photo book at blurb.com. I was quite excited about it.

The first time I made a book with another company resulted in a complete disaster: I had carefully scaled down all of my image to the proper pixel dimensions for the page, saving them with the highest JPEG quality. Guess what? Their software recompressed my images before sending them, with a crappy JPEG quality resulting in ugly JPEG artefacts (see wikipedia if you don't know what it is).

So, of course, I had checked on Blurb website and forums - everything seemed fine, no recompression should be done.

Well, I'm afraid, there IS some recompression even if you create a correct file. Fortunately, I've noticed it while sending 4 times less data that I had expected. Hm. This shouldn't be good.

I've ran some extra tests and spent some more time on it, and here is the result:

  • any file beyond 2 Mb will be recompressed by the application
  • one can assume that JPEG quality 9 – 10 will give a filesize below 2Mb (max quality is JPEG 12)
  • Artifacts quite show up at JPEG quality 9 – they are less noticeable at 10, but 9 is really the moment when you can see them. Especially on detailed red tones and edges of objects.

While probably a lot of images will print more or less correctly, I know that the most detailed ones won't (think of these pics with red umbrellas, red fishes, etc)

Therefore, I don't want you (and me) to pay $40-50 for a book that won't meet my quality standards.

Sure, it's the price of 10 photos for me and I would had got 160 of them (not on photo paper, though). But simply due to tentatives on limiting bandwidth and disk storage, these companies fail on providing a good service.

That is, to say the least, quite stupid.