I love making photo books, especially with Blurb. Their tools make it so easy to put together a stunning book in minutes. The hardest part is coming up with which pictures I want to use! Even more difficult is deciding which photo to use as a cover. Do you go with your favorite photo from the group and place your best face forward? Do you do a collage to round up everything? If it’s a trip, should you go with one of the first pictures, or your favorite moment? It’s really a conundrum! I’ve made dozens of photo books for myself, and for friends and families, so I thought I’d share my tips for choosing the cover photo.
1. Choose one with a great resolution. This is important. If you have a photo with less than stellar resolution, you may still be able to fit it into your book by putting a few pics on the same page or making the photo space smaller and filling the white space with embellishments or text. On the cover, though, it’s going to look horrible.
2. Make sure it’s clear, in focus, and balanced. Even the best camera can take a not-so-spectacular picture, and we all have a few photos that would be incredible if they were just a little more crisp, or a little more balanced in color. While fixing contrast and color balancing issues can help, I don’t think there is a single photo tool on the planet that sharpens a blurry photo so it actually looks good. Sorry, but I’ve used them all, and you can tell every time that it was sharpened.
3. Don’t play favorites! This really isn’t a problem for me, since my son is an only child, but don’t put a picture featuring one child on the cover and delegate the other to the inside pages, even if it would make the perfect cover photo. I think that’s just common sense though.
4. Keep it simple. This is really a personal preference, but I think that cover photos should feature one of the simpler photos in your collection. Pictures with a lot going on are distracting. I plan to make a photo book out of our recent trip with the Cub Scouts to Adventure Aquarium, and while I have many great photos of my son exploring the facility, I’ve decided to go with a simple image that I feel would make a lovely photo book cover. What do you think?
Do you have any great tips for selecting the best photo for a photo book cover? I’d love to hear how you decide! Once you’ve decided on your cover, head over to Blurb to save 15% off all purchases during the entire month of April with code APRIL15!
