Review : Saal Digital Photo Booklet

I recently heard that Saal Digital were offering photographers a credit voucher towards a Photo Booklet, in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Being very new to printing my photographs, I decided to take advantage of this offer to kick-start my printing portfolio.

Note: Photo Booklets have a ring binder spine and a transparent plastic protector at the front and back. Saal Digital also offer traditional Photo Books; hard backed books with a solid spine, which I will (hopefully) review in the future.

Preparation

1. As with all printing, it is important to make sure that your monitor is properly calibrated before you begin. This will ensure that the print colours and brightness of the final printed product will match the photo on your screen as close as possible.
2. Prior to printing I always export my images as sRGB jpg, as this produces accurate print reproduction of my images from my limited recent experience.
3. Download the relevant ICC profiles from Saal Digital. These are useful for Soft Proofing your images in Photoshop or Lightroom, giving you a better idea of how the physical print will look like.

The Software

Saal Digital offer a Adobe Creative Cloud plugin, which enables you to make your photo book directly from Photoshop CC. I could not get this to work on my PC, so I used their proprietary software package instead. Ideally I would like to have used the Photoshop plugin and cut out the additional software, hopefully I will be able to do this with future versions.

The software is relatively user-friendly, and is a one-stop-shop allowing you to print any of their products from one place. You select the product you wish to order, and you are guided through the process. You select page size, paper finish and number of pages. Laying out your photos is as easy as selecting your folder of exported photos, and dragging/dropping them onto the pages. There are several template options if you would like to have multiple photos on a page, but for the purposes of my photo booklet I did not use this feature. You can also spread one image over two pages, which I did try out with a suitable image.  The software allows you to add text to your pages, which I used to create title pages to divide my book up neatly.

You can save your project at any time, and come back to it another day.

When you are done, you select your shipping address and pay from within the software. Now, you just have to wait for delivery!

The Photo Booklet

Specification:

Dimensions: 30cm x 21cm (slightly over A4)

Inside: 62 Pages (49 photos, plus title pages), Matte premium photographic paper

Binding: Metal spiral spine, front and rear translucent matte plastic protector

Summary

Praise:

1. I am very happy with my photo booklet! It exceeds my expectations in almost every way, and I will certainly be returning to Saal Digital in the future.
2. My initial concern was that I had heard that Saal Digital often produces dark prints. In my experience with this product, this is not the case. Monitor calibration and Soft Proofing ensured accurate print reproduction for me.
3. Colourful and vibrant images were reproduced accurately, with no over/under saturation.
4. Dark and moody images have rich and dark shadows, with no loss of detail even in the darkest of corners.
5. Paper quality is good, book feels nice and heavy despite not being a hardback.
6. Print quality is excellent. Images are crisp, as is text on my covers and title pages.
7. Delivery is quick, taking only a few days to print and arrive at your door.
8. You can track your product every step of the way with regular email updates.

Criticisms:

1. The dust jacket has a slightly textured, matte outer side. This results in a slight loss of detail when the cover images are viewed through the plastic protector. I would have preferred this plastic cover to be un-textured, but that may be my picky personal preference here.
2. Where the holes have been punched through the paper, there was a lot of white dust adhering to the surface of the covers. This was more apparent due to the dark colours I used on the covers. This was removed with a few sweeps from a soft paint brush, so not a massive issue.
3. Shame the Adobe Creative Cloud CC plugin would not work for me, I would have liked to use this instead of a proprietary piece of software.