Photo Book Luxury: Picaboo's Ranch Style Book Reviewed [Archive]

Jason Dunn

09-28-2010, 03:00 PM

<img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282448102.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /><h6>Product Category: Photo book</h6><h6>Where to Buy: <a href="http://www.picaboo.com" target="_blank">Picaboo</a></h6><h6>Price: Starts at $299.99 USD (8.5 x 11") or $199.99 USD (6" x 8"); as configured in this review, $539 USD.</h6><h6>System Requirements: Picaboo X is an Adobe Air application that will work on Windows or OS X.</h6>Pros:<ul><li>Easy to use book-building application with lots of extras;</li><li>The Ranch book style is beautiful from start to finish;</li><li>Picaboo provides excellent customer service.</li></ul>Cons:<ul><li>Picaboo books tend to be expensive relative to other book printing companies, though this is mitigated somewhat via regular promotions;</li><li>Picaboo X has some stability and usability issues;</li><li>Picaboo X is not well-suited to computers with a weak CPU, and isn't multi-threaded.</li></ul>Summary: The last time I wrote about Picaboo, it was as part of my <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/97676/the-great-photo-book-round-up-review-who-makes-the-best-photo-books.html" target="_blank">mega photo book review</a> - and they <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/97676/1/1/15" target="_blank">didn't fare very well</a>. I was contacted by someone from Picaboo's marketing department shortly after the review went live, and they were gracious about the issues I pointed out with their system and final product. They offered me a chance to try one of their higher-end books, and to review their new Picaboo X software. I had a personal project in mind that would be perfect for this type of book, so I figured I'd give them another shot. How did they do? Keep reading to find out.Note: This review was written prior to the 10.124P version of the software that adds in the very clever <a href="http://www.picaboo.com/photobooks/bookgenie/index.html" target="_blank">BookGenie</a> option, so that feature isn't discussed.<MORE /><h1>Lots of Options</h1>Picaboo offers more variety than many other photo book printing companies out there today; they offer <a href="http://www.picaboo.com/products-pricing/classic.html" target="_blank">ten distinct style of books</a>, starting at $9.99 for a 6" x 8" soft cover <a href="http://www.picaboo.com/products-pricing/classic.html" target="_blank">Classic</a> book, all the way up to the <a href="http://www.picaboo.com/products-pricing/flush-mount.html" target="_blank">Flush Mount book</a>, which starts at $349 USD for an 8.5" x 11" version. What book style did I opt to build? Ranch in black. The <a href="http://www.picaboo.com/products-pricing/ranch.html" target="_blank">Ranch photo book</a> is a post-bound, lay-flat page style, with archival-quality 110 pound paper, a "full grain distressed leather hardcover" in either black or brown, and features cover stamping. Picaboo uses <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_Digital_Press" target="_blank">HP Indigo presses</a>, and the pages are printed at 300dpi. Sounds like some serious quality, right?It's not an inexpensive book to build - the 6" x 8" version starts at $199.99 USD with 20 pages, and costs $1.99 per page up to 160 pages. The 8.5" x 11" version starts at $299.99 USD with 20 pages, and additional pages are $2.99 each, up to 160 pages total. A 100-page book, pretty typical for a wedding album, clocks in at $359 (6" x 8") or $539 (8.5" x 11"). This is a premium-quality book reserved for only the most special of occasions, not your typical vacation photo book. Sounds perfect for a wedding album, right? That's what I was hoping for!<h1>Getting Started with Picaboo X</h1>Picaboo X is an <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/air/" target="_blank">Adobe Air</a>-based application, so it's a fast, easy installation. I installed it on an <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/94177/hp-pavilion-dv2-unboxing-and-first-impressions.html" target="_blank">HP dv2</a>, which is a dual-core 1.6 Ghz AMD Neo CPU-based system with 4 GB of RAM. Picaboo X is installed directly from <a href="http://www.picaboo.com/download" target="_blank">Picaboo's Web site</a> and I had no trouble installing it from Google's Chrome browser. I already had Adobe Air installed because I use the awesome <a href="http://www.tweetdeck.com" target="_blank">Tweetdeck</a>, but if the user hasn't installed Adobe Air before, there's an extra step.<img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1282452759.usr1.png" style="border: 0;" />Figure 1: Installing Picaboo X is fast and simple.<img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1282452829.usr1.png" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" />Figure 2: No books have been created yet, so it's a blank slate.After the install, Picaboo X offered to let me create an account, but curiously didn't offer me the opportunity to log in with the Picaboo account that I already had. After clicking "OK," I was presented with an overview video of how Picaboo X works. It's a nice touch that gave me the basics of how the software works. This is great for both beginners and experienced photo book makers alike. After the installation, you're left looking at a blank bookshelf. After clicking "New," I was off!<img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1282453185.usr1.png" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" />Figure 3: Selecting a theme is the first step in creating your book.Picaboo books are organized around themes - there are 16 master themes, and many of them have sub-categories. I was making a wedding book for my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, so I selected Wedding and was given the option of Wedding and Wedding Linen. The preview window that shows you the style is quite tiny, so it's hard to really grasp how each style differs from each other - but you can customize the book after this step, so I selected Wedding and moved forward.<img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1282453447.usr1.png" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" />Figure 4: Importing the images.The next step was to select the photos for the book; a file picker appears, and it automatically starts in the Pictures directory, exactly the way it should work. I selected the folder that had the wedding photos in it — all 524 of them — and Picaboo X immediately started to scan them all. It was taking around 1.5 seconds per photo, and looking at the Task Manager, I could see it was using 45% to 50% of the total CPU resources, meaning that it was a single-threaded application unable to take advantage of multiple CPU cores. That's quite disappointing, because I had hoped that a new development platform like Adobe Air would have multi-threading built right in. I toggled away from the application to work on something else while it scanned, and after about two minutes I noticed Picaboo X was no longer running. Huh?Here's where you'll want to stop reading if all of your photos are 13 megapixels or under and <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/100402/2/1/7" target="_self">skip to the next section</a>; what follows is a titanic struggle with a number crashes of Picaboo X, all because I had hundreds of weirdly formatted images that were 17.4 megapixels in size.<PAGE /><h1>Crash, Crash, Crash</h1>If you want to see how a software bug combined with a series of rare circumstances can really ruin a review, keep reading. The Picaboo X process was no longer running, so it had crashed. I was surprised, because Tweetdeck has never crashed on me, which led me to believe (incorrectly or not) that Adobe Air had some serious inherent stability. I re-started Picaboo X and was staring at a blank bookshelf again; it looks like it doesn't save your book until you've finished the initial process. Ouch.I repeated the previous step, this time watching things more closely. It rapidly scanned through the first 50 images, then slowed down to the previous page of 1.5 seconds per image. When it reached around 100 images, it crashed again. I re-started it and repeated the process yet again — this time watching the Task Manager, playing a hunch about memory usage. Sure enough, when Picaboo X loads, it's using around 120 MB of memory. As it scans the images that it has already scanned, the memory usage creeps up by about 10 MB every couple of seconds. By the time the application has scanned 300 images, it's using about 250 MB of memory. As soon as it hits the images it hasn't scanned though, the memory usage jumps by about 40 to 60 MB per image. After about two minutes, the memory usage hits a staggering 1.6 GB, and the application crashes. I suspect it's some sort of 32-bit memory addressing issue, but I'm not a developer (nor do I play one on TV).<img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1282453503.usr1.png" style="border: 0;" />Figure 5: Check out the memory usage of the Picaboo X executable!Sensing a pattern now, I opted for a brute-force approach: I repeating the image scanning process until all 524 images had been scanned. It took about eight attempts and 15 minutes to do so. I suspect the software is doing thumbnail extraction of some sort, and something about the images I was using was tripping up the process. I did a few experiments with other, smaller batches of images, and the scans proceeded much faster and there were no crashes. These other images were in the 6- to 8-megapixel range, and under 100 images per folder. By comparison, the photos in the wedding folder were between 12 megapixels and 17 megapixels, and there were 524 of them. What was going on exactly?At this point, I turned to Picaboo's tech support, and I have to say I found the level of support to be superb — under the Help menu, there's a Report a Bug option, and when you submit a bug, it automatically submits a log file. When Picaboo tech support analyzed the log file from my repeated crashes, they discovered a couple of things. First, somehow the images that I was using lacked a thumbnail embedded in the header of the JPEG file. Because the thumbnails were missing, Picaboo X had to generate them, and when it ran into the large 17.4 megapixel images, the process of generating those thumbnails caused the memory usage to get out of control. By the time this review is published, this issue should be fixed with a new release of Picaboo X.How did I end up with images lacking thumbnails? And how did the images end up 17.4 megapixels in size when they were taken by a 12.1 megapixel Nikon D700? Baffled, I emailed the photographer to ask if the images were up-sampled — I couldn't think of any logical reason why a professional would up-sample nearly every image before giving it to the client — but, sure enough, she confirmed that she up-sampled the images. When I asked why, she never replied with an answer.While you might want to up-sample an image before printing it to a poster-sized print, it's utterly ridiculous to up-sample every image you have. It needlessly bloats the file size and creates images that are harder to manipulate elsewhere (as evidenced by this section of the review). And even if you wanted to do a poster-sized print, the companies that provide that service have industrial-strength software that will do a better up-sampling job than any consumer-grade software. I really can't hold Picaboo responsible for the decisions made by the wedding photographer; these crashes wouldn't have happened to anyone but me...or another client of this wedding photographer making a book using Picaboo X!<h1><PAGE /></h1><h1>Building the Book</h1>I was able to proceed to the next step after my images were imported. Strangely, I noticed that it wasn't showing me the photos in the proper order; they were mixed up. All the photos were numbered sequentially, and the time stamps were also still correct. Puzzling!<img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1282539383.usr1.png" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" />Figure 6: Adding photos to the book.I selected all the photos and clicked Next...only to be told via a pop-up window that Picaboo X runs best with 300 photos or less selected. It let me proceed, however, which was nice — I thought it was going to force me to select only 300 of the 524 photos. I wasn't planning on putting all 524 photos into the book, but I wanted to have the option of selecting the best photos as I went along building the book rather than doing a pre-selection process.<img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1282539419.usr1.png" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" />Figure 7: This part can take a long time depending on the CPU speed on your computer.Just for fun I tried the "Auto Create Using StoryFlow" option, which would build the book for me. I groaned when I saw it taking about two seconds per picture...this was going to take a long time. There's no way to cancel the process though, which forced me to kill the entire application. That's just bad programming; there should always be a way for the customer to cancel a process.After re-starting the application, I selected the "From Scratch" book building option. I was dismayed to see it kick off the same process as the Auto Create function — adding each photo, one at a time, taking two seconds per photo. Evidently I should have been building this book on my overclocked 3.5 Ghz Intel Core i7 computer. It would be great if Picaboo X would process the images faster...and it would do exactly that if it were multi-core enabled. I hate seeing software that doesn't take advantage of modern hardware.To be thorough, I tested a different set of photos on a different computer, and on a system with Core 2 Duo Extreme clocked at 2.93 Ghz, it took about one second per image. If I were building a book with 300 images, that would be roughly five minutes of waiting. I've never seen book building software that makes the user wait so much; Picaboo needs to figure out how to make this software faster, because it's definitely not the norm for the industry.<PAGE /><h1>Finally! Let's Get Started</h1>After I opted to build the book from scratch, I was pleased to see all but one of the images in the correct order, from oldest to newest. This would make building the book much easier. You can easily flip from one book style to another, which is quite different from other book publishing services with which once you select a book style or size, it's locked in. I opted to build the Ranch style book; clicking on the "Pricing & Options" link takes you to the Picaboo Web site's <a href="http://www.picaboo.com/products-pricing/" target="_blank">Products & Pricing page</a>, but strangely not to the particular book style that you clicked on (a curious oversight).<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-figure8.png" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282539495.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 8: Live cover previews: Nice! [Click the image above for a larger version]Picaboo X is attractively designed, easy to use software. The first step is to select the style of book you want; the software helpfully gives you a photo-realistic render of the cover, so when I selected the black Ranch style, I immediately saw what it would look like (Figure 8).<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-figure9.png" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282540407.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 9: Text can be added to the page. [Click the image above for a larger version]All of the tools for building the book are in the left column:<ul><li>Book Styles: Selecting a different book style gives you an immediate change in the cover preview. Default text is placed on the cover, so you can alter it immediately and depending on the book style, you have a few different options for the colour and placement of the text. I opted for silver text in the bottom right corner.</li></ul><ul><li>Page Layout: There are dozens of different layouts for one photo, two photos, three photos, four photos, five or more, and captions only. Each option is a one-click way to generate a visually interesting layout on your page. You simply drag and drop a photo into each frame. With some of the layouts, I didn't feel like the images were big enough on the page; Picaboo and I have different opinions about the amount of negative space needed on a page.</li><li>Backgrounds: You want backgrounds? You've got backgrounds! In addition to picking any colour you want, including the ability to use an eyedropper to pick a colour from one of your images, there are over 12,000 background images to chose from. Yes, that's right over twelve thousand. I've never seen a selection this big, and Picaboo makes them easy to sort through; you can search by key word, browse by theme, by designer, look at the ones that are most viewed, backgrounds that were recently used, and browse favourites that you tag.</li><li>Corners: A bit too cheesy for me to probably ever use, corners are a staple of any classic scrapbook design, and Picaboo offers a couple of dozen. Given their sheer number of backgrounds, I'm a bit surprised they don't offer more.</li><li>Photo Tools: There is a variety of adjustments that can be made to photos in your book. Images can be zoomed-in, then moved around inside the photo frame. Images can be put on top of each other, or sent backward, allowing you creative options in your layout. Image adjustments can be made via brightness, contrast, and saturation; there are one-click toggles for black & white or sepia effects. The image adjustments are quite crude (which I'll get into later). Image borders can be toggled off or on, and the colour of the border can be selected, but you can't control the thickness of the border. Drop-shadows can be toggled off or on. There's also a red-eye removal tool.</li><li>Caption Tools: Using the caption tool, you can select any font loaded on your system, and control the font size (including bold, italics, and underlined), alignment, colour, and the background colour of the caption box, including an opacity slider. The opacity slider in particular allows for some creative options.</li></ul><a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-figure10.png" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282540502.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 10: An example of a three-image page layout on each page. [Click the image above for a larger version]<PAGE /><h1>The Process of Building My Book</h1>Picaboo X is a blend of a local and online application; as you're browsing through backgrounds for instance, there's a telltale delay of an online download. This means it's ill-suited for book building when you're disconnected from the Internet and want backgrounds. On the other hand, it means they can offer thousands of backgrounds without loading them all up on the local hard drive, which is a trade-off that's worth it in my opinion.<img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1282540655.usr1.png" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" />Figure 11: As you hover over each thumbnail image, it expands to get bigger.In terms of performance, unfortunately Picaboo X isn't a good match for the dual-core 1.6 Ghz Neo CPU on the HP dv2. I saw significant lag when clicking on buttons; quite often I'd click several times because I was unsure of whether or not the click had registered. The photo Move tool in particular reminded me of a terminal services window in which you'd type, and wait, type, and wait; I'd click an arrow to move an image, and a second later, it would move it. If I held down for too long, it would keep moving for ten seconds after I stopped clicking, forcing me to move it in the opposite direction. It was similar when adding new pages; I'd click, and 2-3 seconds later, a new page would be added. It feels like moving in slow motion. Picaboo X needs some serious CPU horsepower to work properly; it was a much nicer experience using it on my desktop computer. Not to beat a dead horse even further into the ground, but if the application were multi-threaded, performance on laptops would likely be greatly improved. If my laptop has two CPU cores, the software should use them both.As I was using Picaboo X, I was continuing the conversation with tech support, and they informed me that in an update coming soon, they'll be using a lower resolution image in the image drag and drop process, which should dramatically improve performance on lower-end hardware. It's a start.I jotted down some general thoughts as I built the book, so here they are:<ul><li>You can click and drag the images to resize them, but there's no snapping to fixed points on the page, which means you're eyeballing them for accuracy if you're trying to line them up with each other. Even with the grid turned on, I'm not about to guess at making two images the same size on a book this expensive. There's also no easy way to resize an image by a certain percentage or measurement; everything is done via dragging sizing handles, which is extremely imprecise.</li><li>Picaboo X creates a project file that has all of the full-resolution images embedded in it; this makes for some large file archive sizes — my project was nearly 700 MB — but I prefer this because it means in the future I can easily edit the same book again. This is a far better approach than some of the other photo book making software out there that use virtual links, meaning if you ever move the original images, your entire book will break when you open it again (I'm looking at you, <a href="http://www.photobookcanada.com/" target="_blank">Photobook Canada</a>).</li><li>Because I had selected a lay-flat book, I was hoping I'd be able to create a two-page spread of a single image. Unless I'm missing something, that's not possible, which is a real shame. A two-page spread of a single image on a lay-flat book can be visually stunning.</li><li>The software does some really clever things in the background; it "streams" the book up to the Picaboo server, uploading the images you're using as you build the book. When you go to submit your book, it only uploads the changes, greatly speeding things up. I was shocked — in a good way — at how fast my book uploaded when I had finished it. This is some brilliant programming!</li><li>In stark contrast to the image Move tool, which is too fine-grained for my liking, the Zoom tool isn't fine-grained enough; you have to click and drag the slider, and even the slightest movement of it has a big impact on your image. It would be natural to be able to click on the Zoom icons to the left and right of the zoom slider to get precise movements, but that's not the case. It's very difficult to use this tool using a laptop trackpad; I was constantly over-shooting the zoom setting I wanted.</li><li>Because of the expense of this book, I asked Picaboo tech support to take a look at my book and tell me if if there would be any issues with it. I was told a few of the images were a bit dark, and that I should use the brightness tool to fix the issue. I didn't have access to the original raw files, only JPEGs, and I figured a slight bump with the brightness tool inside Picaboo X would be a better solution that editing and re-compressing the JPEGs in question. The brightness tool is like using a chainsaw to trim your fingernails though; it's overkill, boosting every part of the image. It was really hard for me to see how well the tool worked, especially when I combined it with a slight bump in contrast; everything looked liked low-res mush. Ultimately, Picaboo X needs a fill light (shadow boost) tool for adjustments of dark images.</li></ul><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1282540705.usr1.png" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" />Figure 12: There was a visual bug with the text on the front cover of my book.There was also a strange visual bug with the front cover. I had opted for the lower right-hand corner alignment for the text, but it was being cut off. Picaboo tech support informed me that the cover text is stamped by hand, so the final result wouldn't be cropped. Whew! I'd hate to order an expensive photo book like this and have the cover text not be exactly how I wanted it to be. [Cue foreshadowing music now.]<img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282624781.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" />Figure 13: Here is the browser-based book sharing feature.Before ordering the book, it's good to see how it looks. There's a preview function that renders full-resolution previews. Not surprisingly, this was nearly useless on the HP dv2 due to CPU speed, but it worked decently on my desktop PC. Picaboo also offers an online sharing function; you select your book, select how you want to share it (Facebook or Email), and when you give it an email address and a custom message, it will send an email to that person with a link to a Flash-based version of your book. It works well enough, though I'd preferred to see it scale to the browser window, so if you went full-screen it would get bigger. Right now the best you can do is click on each page and a pop-up image shows you a larger preview of that page.I placed the order for my book on August 3rd, and received it via Fedex on August 19th.<PAGE /><h1>The Results</h1>As you can tell if you've read this far, I've had a real up-and-down experience with Picaboo X; there are some really great things about the software, but more than a few things that were frustrating — and that's not counting the problems I had with my screwy images. So if the software experience wasn't great, what's the end product like? Keep reading...<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-ranch-photo-book-review-01.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282436129.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 14: The finished book comes with free bubble wrap. [Click the image above for a larger version]When the FedEx package arrived, I excitedly ripped it open...and my first reaction was "Really?". For a book that costs almost $600, I was expecting a bit of...presentation! MPix puts the book in <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/97676/12/1/15" target="_blank">a box with a ribbon</a> for an $80-ish book, so I was expecting at least that much effort for this very expensive book. Instead, it came in simple bubble wrap. This does a great job of protecting the book from harm, but I really think Picaboo can do better than bubble wrap; at this price point I'd expect to see something the owner could use to permanently protect the book when it's not on display. Or, at the very least, a nice envelope (which is <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/97676/7/1/15" target="_blank">what Kodak Gallery does</a>) — basically anything other than bubble wrap. Since I've never ordered a book this expensive before, I have no idea if this is the norm for the high-end book industry or not. But enough of that: on to the book!<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-ranch-photo-book-review-02.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282436158.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 15: Plastic wrap adds an extra layer of protection. [Click the image above for a larger version]After I removed the bubble wrap, the book itself was sealed in plastic - a nice touch to protect it even further.<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-ranch-photo-book-review-03.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282436173.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 16: Finally, a look at the book! [Click the image above for a larger version]And, finally, we have the book in its full glory. I'm not an expert on leather, but it looks gorgeous on the book: glossy, pure black, and the random grain pattern gives it a unique look. The stitching is flawless as well; everything about it screams "Quality." In this case, you really can judge a book by its cover.<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-ranch-photo-book-review-04.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282436189.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 17: Hey, wait a minute... [Click the image above for a larger version]One of the things I noticed right away was that the cover text wasn't in the lower right corner — remember figure 12? The text looked nice smack in the middle of the cover, but that's not what I ordered. I contacted Picaboo about this, and they informed me that there was a "recently introduced glitch" that caused this problem. They offered me the option of shipping the book back, in which case they'd replace the cover with the correct version, or to provide me with a gift card I could use toward a future order. See what I mean about excellent customer service?Ultimately, I'm not too bothered by this particular glitch, and won't be sending it back for repair, but it's obviously imperative for Picaboo to deliver the book the way the customer designed it, so they need to get this addressed. This glitch is another in a fairly long list of glitches; Picaboo's quality control on their software isn't what I'd call inspiring. And it seems Picaboo's process is heavily automated, without much (any?) human oversight; that's the only way I could get <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/97676/1/1/15" target="_blank">a baby book that turned out this badly</a>. Compare that with <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/97676/12/1/15" target="_blank">MPix</a> or <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/97676/2/1/15" target="_blank">Treasure-Book</a> with which the final product is inspected before going out to the customer, and you get a different approach to photo book making.Bottom line? Picaboo's excellent customer service will ensure that you'll be satisfied eventually, but if their front-end process were more quality-based and less automated, odds are higher their customers would be completely satisfied with the first attempt. But back to the book...<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-ranch-photo-book-review-05.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282436208.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 18: Here is the ranch style book from the bottom. [Click the image above for a larger version]I've never seen book binding quite like this before. It's extremely high-quality and looks built to last.<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-ranch-photo-book-review-06.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282436220.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 19: The ranch style book looks fine from the spine. [Click the image above for a larger version]<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-ranch-photo-book-review-07.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282436233.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 20: The ranch style book looks just as nice from the front. [Click the image above for a larger version]<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-ranch-photo-book-review-08.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282436250.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 21: Mmm. Leather. [Click the image above for a larger version]With apologies to any vegans reading this review, the genuine leather cover on the ranch style photo book really takes the book to a whole new level; it feels and looks like a mystic tome from 500 years ago...beautiful and luxurious.<PAGE /><h1>The Results (Continued)</h1><a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-ranch-photo-book-review-09.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282436264.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 22: Here is the opening page of the book. [Click the image above for a larger version]When I opened this beautiful book, I was surprised to see a semi-transparent page in front of the first page of my book; it hadn't shown me that page in the book preview. The semi-transparent nature of the paper adds a dash of class to an already classy book, so it's a nice touch, but why not show it in the preview?<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-ranch-photo-book-review-10.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282436277.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 23: Wow. [Click the image above for a larger version]The very talented wedding photographer gave me some great images to work with, so I picked the most stunning image of the whole shoot to open the book. Combined with partial text from <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+13&version=NIV" target="_blank">First Corinthians</a>, the classic and oft-quoted "love verse" from the Bible, I think it makes a real statement. If I've done my job properly as a book designer, this is the moment when tears should start to appear in the eyes of the bride. The lay-flat page is just gorgeous; no spine gets in the way of the impact of the image.<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-ranch-photo-book-review-11.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282436299.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 24: High-quality printing is combined with high-quality paper. [Click the image above for a larger version]The book is high-quality all the way through: the lay-flat pages allow your images and layouts to really pop, and the user doesn't have to fight with the book spine. The paper is what I'd describe as semi-gloss. It's not as glossy as typical photo paper, but there's definitely gloss to the pages. The backgrounds I selected in Picaboo X look great printed on the page. The printing itself in terms of image quality looked quite good; an average person looking at the images would say they looked great.If you have an eye for such things though, you may notice what I noticed: a slight pattern of horizontal lines running through the images. I think this is the grain of the paper itself; it's very subtle and unlikely to be noticed by 99.9% of people on most images. If I compare the print quality of the images themselves to a book from Photobook Canada, I prefer the Photobook Canada images — I can't see any grain on the paper in the Photobook Canada book. I want to stress that the vast majority of people will not notice this, so I don't consider it to be a negative against Picaboo; it's simply a side-effect of the particular paper they use.I have one slight complaint here: I could tell upon which images I'd boosted the brightness, which didn't surprise me. As I explained earlier, brightness boost is blunt-force instrument. The moral of the story here is to tweak all your photos outside Picaboo in real photo editing software and make sure they're nice and bright; don't use the Picaboo tools to adjust your images after the fact.<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-ranch-photo-book-review-12.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282436320.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 25: A single image spread over two pages might have worked nicely here, but sadly that option isn't available. [Click the image above for a larger version]More than a few of the photos had elements at the edge of the image — look at the woman on the right page for instance — but because there's no spine involved, the lay-flat pages allow you to use images that would otherwise be problematic.<a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dht/2010/picaboo-ranch-photo-book-review-13.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1282436341.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></a>Figure 26: The final page of the book had a surprise. [Click the image above for a larger version]Remember that semi-transparent page at the start of the book? Here's the real reason why it's included: so that Picaboo can put their logo on the last page in the book. As I mentioned earlier, this wasn't shown to me in the book preview. If the logo is going to be there, it should absolutely be shown to the buyer and not be a post-purchase surprise. If someone is spending nearly $600 on a photo book, I honestly don't think there's any reason for the photo book company to splash their logo on it in such a visible way.I understand that Picaboo wants to promote itself, but after having such a wonderful experience looking through this book, it seemed a bit tacky for this to be the last visual element in the book. I'm the book designer, and the flow of all the visuals should be my decision, not Picaboo's. I'd have preferred to see it on the bottom of the inside cover if it really had to be there. I didn't mention the logo to my wife, and when she finished looking through the book, she was equally surprised and dismayed at the placement of the logo.I asked Picaboo about this logo, and they said that on the ranch style book, there's no option to have the logo removed. The <a href="http://www.picaboo.com/products-pricing/regency.html" target="_blank">regency style book</a> has no branding at all, which makes it a popular choice among wedding photographers, according to Picaboo. I think Picaboo is limiting its potential sales to professional photographers (and even enthusiastic amateurs) by not offering a logo-free option on all of its high-end books. Picaboo should, at the very least, make its branding more subtle if it's going to be forced upon the buyer.<object width="600" height="360" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/g5Acyf0jF0c&ap=&fmt=18" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/g5Acyf0jF0c&ap=&fmt=18" /></object>The video above walks through the book and is largely redundant if you've read this entire section, but if you switch to 1080p and go full screen, you'll get a better idea of some of the physical qualities of the book.<h1>Conclusion</h1>Picaboo's ranch style book is a stunningly beautiful photo book. The full-grained, black leather cover with its silver-stamped text; the thick, archival-quality paper; the lay-flat pages and high-quality printing...it all adds up to a luxurious visual feast of photo goodness. I fully expect jaws to drop when I present this book to my sister-in-law and her husband. Other than my dislike of the Picaboo logo on the last page, the physical product is flawless. Picaboo nailed it.On the other hand, Picaboo X, the software used to create this book, is more of a mixed bag; it scores fairly high on the scale of "could my mom use this", but even if I exclude the problems caused by the images I was given, there are stability and performance issues that I can't overlook. The software is resource-intensive and because it ignores multiple CPU cores, it doesn't scale well to modern hardware — the very thing it should be doing. The number of page layout options and background choices, as well as all the themes, help offset these problems; ultimately, given time, effort, and intensive testing, Picaboo should be able to iron out the most obvious flaws in their software. They're on the right track with Picaboo X; it just needs refinement.Bottom line: If you're looking for the ultimate in photo book quality, and you have the budget for it, the ranch style book from Picaboo should be on your short list of choices.Jason Dunn owns and operates <a href="http://www.thoughtsmedia.com/" target="_blank">Thoughts Media Inc.</a>, a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys <a href="http://photos.jasondunn.com/" target="_blank">photography</a>, mobile devices, <a href="http://www.jasondunn.com/" target="_blank">blogging</a>, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, his wonderful son Logan, and his sometimes obedient dog. He likes making photo books.<img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//ppct/auto/1240336793.usr1.gif" />Do you enjoy using new hardware, software and accessories, then sharing your experience with others? 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