Photo Book Tips: Look Before You Leap with Preview

Preview: a feature of Inkubook that’s so helpful and yet so often overlooked. Poor Preview. Let’s make him happy by giving him some love.

The Preview button as it looks today and as it will look later this week.

In case you’ve never noticed our friend Preview, I’ve placed a picture of him to the right. Why are there two? Well, the little blue guy is what Preview looks like today. Later this week he’s going to get a makeover along with the rest of his family, and he’s going to be a bigger, bolder, more yellow version of himself. Perhaps he won’t be so overlooked then.

Anyway, the reason Preview is so helpful is because when you use it, you get to see your book in a format that more closely resembles an actual printed book. It’s still not quite like holding a book in your hands because Preview is a two-dimensional picture rather than a three-dimensional thing, but it’s pretty close. All the picture and text container boxes are stripped out. We’ve added a little shading that simulates what the roll of the pages will look like when you have the book open in front of you. The gallery panels are moved out of the way so all your focus can be on the book.

Let’s look at an example of how Preview helped me decide I needed to make a change in one of my books. Below is a spread from a book about my dog Pete (aka Pistol Pete) and my cat Milo (aka The Catnip Kid). I’ve used backgrounds from the Pets collection, and I chose a nice beige color for the text because it seemed like it would complement the backgrounds nicely. Looks pretty decent in the Editor view, don’t you think?

In the Editor, I can easily read all my captions…

If I were to buy this book without checking it out in Preview, I’d be a little disappointed when it arrived at my house. While the beige text does coordinate nicely with the colors in the backgrounds, it doesn’t show up so well in the caption under the picture of Milo in the basket because it’s basically the same color as the beige stripe. I hadn’t noticed this when I was editing the book because of the gray background of the text boxes. Now using Preview I can see that the caption looks like it says “And he’s an exp    h     .” Look at the shot of the spread in Preview to see what I mean.

…but in Preview part of one caption fades into the background.

Now that I know what my text actually looks like, I can go back to the Editor to play with different colors of my captions to find something that works a little better on my backgrounds.

Eager though you might be to order your book and have it in your hot little hands, make sure to use Preview to give it a double-check before clicking Buy. You might find that you’re able to make your book even better than it already is.