Welcome to the London Drugs | photo lab Home Edition Tips and Tricks document.

Two-Page Spreads

Any of your pictures can be used as a background for a two-page spread. Just drag a picture from the Image Browser to a page (but not onto a frame), and when asked “Would you like your picture to be used as a background for a single page, or across a two-page spread?” click the Two-Page Spread button.

Adjusting & Cropping Your Pictures

Click in the middle of the image you would like adjusted, click on the 4-directional arrows to move the image left or right.
On the Tool Bar, click on the + magnifier to crop in, click on the – magnifier to crop out

Black & White and Sepia Filters, Fading

Click on the Tool Bar, then click Black & White Filter icon or Sepia Filter icon
To the right of the Sepia Filter icon is the Fading icon with a range from 0 to 100

Aligning Pictures

You can assure your pictures will be properly aligned with each other, as well as relative to the page, by using the View, show Grid and Snap to Grid control.

Adding Borders

To add a Border to your images, click on the Picture Borders on the right hand side of the screen.

Photo Book Cover

The design process for the cover of your photo book is the same as for the interior pages. Frames captions, grids, and so on behave exactly as they do within the book.

Designing Pages in Adobe Photoshop®

If you plan to design some or all of your pages in Adobe Photoshop®, there are a few more things you need to know:
Bleed – when one or more sides of a printed image touch the edge of the paper. The use of bleed guarantees that the finished (cropped) page will look neat & precise. The page bleed allowance should be 1/8 inch at all four sides of the page. The bleed area (i.e. beyond the crop marks) will be trimmed off. If you use a background color or image, it should fill the entire page including the bleed area. For example, if your printed page size is 8.3 inch wide, your page design should be 8.55 inch wide with the bleed (1/8” + 8.3” + 1/8”).
2 Page Spread – this is a page design than spans both right & left-hand pages. The pages are centered at the gutter where they are bound into the spine. Approximately 1/4" of the spread will be bound into (and thus hidden within) the spine. This, in of itself, is not a problem, but it does require a bit of special attention when using an external tool, such as Adobe Photoshop to create your page designs: Be sure to leave bleed on all 4 sides. The My Photo Books software will automatically adjust any background used as if it has a bleed designed into it. Keep important design details at least 1/8” from all sides of the page (1/4” is even better) so that unwelcome trimming does not occur. Keep important design details an extra 1/4" away from the center binding (this is in addition to the bleed you leave on all 4 sides of the page). This is an issue specifically for single page designs. The software will adjust the spread pages for the 1/4" lost within the spine. To this end, the spread should be designed to be 1/4" smaller than the size that it would be if you were to include the gutter. Also, keep in mind that although page spreads are well suited for panoramic picture backgrounds, fine details may be partially obscured within the binding. The following table is a guide to page and spread size design: