Monday 6 June 2016

Saal Digital Photobook Review

Hello all! I'm here today to share a review of a little photobook which I designed using Saal Digital's software! I'm going to review my experience from start to finish and I'll share a couple of photos too.

 So firstly, I'm going to talk about the software. I downloaded the software from their website (here) and it installed fairly quickly. I would say if you've got a quick connection then including install you're probably going to be up and running within 5 minutes. 

On opening the software you're pretty much thrust into the action. You choose your book size, your paper weight, your amount of pages & you're off to a flying start. You've got the option to import from a number of places but I would have liked an option of being able to import from Flickr. I imported my photographs and you have options to let the software auto-place your photographs onto the photobook or you can choose to do it yourself. I chose to do it myself. You then have many options of layout and design. I played around with a few of these but I prefer big wide open spreads. I played around and eventually put together my photobook. I designed my own front and back cover using Photoshop but I reckon it's probably easy enough to put together something using the software. 

The payment was so quick that I'd almost forgotten that I'd actually checked out! The book arrived 5 days later (it came from Germany so pretty speedy!). It came really well packaged, wrapped in a protective plastic wrap and then in it's own sealed plastic bag. 

 So now onto the book itself. I choose the option of landscape and it was the size, when open, of two A4 pieces of paper stuck together at the short side. I've added some images in below but it's hard to get an accurate view of how long it is. On first impressions I was impressed. The quality is really quite stunning. I went for a matte cover which on reflection requires some degree of care not to get fingerprints on it as they do show up. Inside is glossy and it really does show off your images! The colours are spot on and really do become eye-catching! I love that the book spreads flat too which really helps show of your images really well instead of having that annoying fold in the middle.

If I were to pay for this book (I got it free as part of reviewing it!) then I would find that £40 is a little steep. However the quality really is excellent and for a one-off then the price probably isn't too bad. If you were ordering quite a few of these then the price would probably be a bit hefty. Overall I'm impressed with how easy the software was to use and was impressed with the quality of the book itself. Do check out Saal Digital and give them a go!

If there's anything I've missed or anything you'd like to know, please leave a comment! 











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