Thanks for the great Photo Book reviews! Quite the breakdown - I only wish I had found it a year ago. My wife & I put together photo books as center pieces for our wedding reception (by PhotoInPress.ca), for guests to flip through (instead of the all too typical projected slideshow). It was a lot of fun to do, and helped build some confidence that we could do our own photo book when it came time for the wedding photos.
We ended up using Smilebooks out of the USA. Their cost when compared to anyone else for lay-flat pages, coupled with their frequently offered coupon codes made them an extremely affordable option when compared to Adoramapix & Picaboo at the time I was looking around. I simply had a colleague out of the USA ship them to me (I too, am in Calgary). Thanks for your previous mention of BorderLinx.com! Luckily, Smilebook will soon be shipping to Canada (or at least parnering with a Canadian printer... I am not sure which is the case) as they have launched a Canadian website (http://www.smilebooks.ca). Their support people have told me they are hoping to launch this month in August, 2011 though it could be later.
Thank you for mentioning LumaPixFotoFusion as well! I have already created our Egyptian Honeymoon photo album natively in Smilebooks' software, though may look into FotoFusion for subsequent projects. I did a travel blog/journal and used this in the photo book - so layouts had become a bit more complex and cumbersome. Their software held up fine, though I like the idea of exporting single JPEG's to use as full page bleeds, as the majority of my book involves plenty of stitched panoramic landscapes.
A technical question for you regarding photo books & vignettes. Although you have done full page bleeds for everything... I have done a few photos as vignette's (either fade edges to white, or fade to black). Having a background color on the Photo Book page of either Black or White, do you believe this is too risky to assume the Black from the photo will be printed seamlessly to the Black of their background color? Same situation for fade-to-white images & white backgrounds Should I instead, create a page layout in Photoshop instead and not risk this?
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