We’re known for our gorgeous photo books and calendars but this year we’re starting a new tradition with personalized photo stationery cards. Our new 4×8 Flat Stationery Cards are a fun and festive way to send well wishes to everyone on your list. Unlike those flimsy photo paper cards you get at the drugstore, Inkubook photo stationery cards are professionally printed on thick, premium cardstock.

Choose from several different backgrounds, layouts, photo borders and up to 4 photos to make this year’s holiday card uniquely yours. Or, if you’re a digital scrapbooker, you will love our Do-It-Yourself full-bleed card template that allows you to upload custom layouts. If you plan on making a photo book or calendar anytime soon, you also have a chance to sample a free set of our new cards.

Place any book or calendar order of $30 or more by Friday, November 6, 2009. Enter code FREECARDS during checkout and we’ll send you a personal coupon code good for a set of 12 cards with envelopes. You must then redeem your free card coupon by November 25, 2009 and pay applicable shipping charges. One use per customer. Not valid with any other promotion or offer.

While it might be a little early to look ahead to next year, it’s never too early to start working on a personalized photo calendar. At 19×13.5 inches, the Super Big Calendar can hold more than 100 of your favorite photos. We have updated templates for 2010 so you can get a jump on making one of the most popular holiday gifts of the season.

Make your Super Big Calendar by October 31, 2009 and enjoy complimentary standard ground shipping to U.S. addresses (or $8.99 off any other shipping method). Just enter code SHIPCAL10 during checkout. (Code may be used once per customer. Not valid with any other offer or promotion).

Yesterday’s post explained how to get photos from your Flickr account into the Inkubook editing space. Today, I want to explore what can be done with Flickr in advance to save a little time in the creation process and to make everything run a little more smoothly.

Use Sets

Adding Photos to Sets in Flickr

Sets in Flickr allow you to group photos into virtual albums. Unlike real world albums, you can put individual photos into multiple sets. Prior to building your Inkubook, it would not be a bad idea to create a new set specifically for the book. Then you can then go and grab all of the photos in one fell swoop.

Rotate Your Photos

While Inkubook allows you to rotate your photos, it is within the context of your book and can only be done to one photo at a time. We are working on adding additional functionality here, but in the meantime there is always Flickr. If you have a lot of photos that need to be rotated, Flickr allows you to do so en masse via their Batch Organize tool. Simply drag the images into the editing pane and select “Rotate” from the “Edit photos” menu.

Edit Your Photos

Editing Photos in Flickr with Picnik

In a previous post, I had mentioned one of my new favorite image editing tools Picnik. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Flickr and Picnik have partnered to provide image editing services to Flickr members. To access the tool, simply select an image and click on the “Edit Photo” icon above it. You’ll be taken to an editing screen with all of your favorite Picnik tools. These include the basics of rotate, crop, resize, exposure, colors, sharpen, red-eye reduction, and auto-fix in addition to the rich Create toolset that allows for all kinds of powerful effects (see here for more details). Upon saving, the updated image is added to your Flickr photostream.

Name Your Photos

While we try to make it as easy as possible to identify your photos in Inkubook, there are some things that are really hard to see – the perennial “Is Kit making a stupid face?” question, for example. There is no easier way to identify a photo than with a good descriptive title. Be sure to add titles in Flickr prior to importing photos into Inkubook to avoid searching for that one good shot.

Other Important Stuff to Know

Import Order

Flickr exports photos to Inkubook in the order that they were loaded into Flickr. Any organizing and reordering that you do on Flickr will not have any affect on this. Import order is also affected by the sizes of photos, such that when Flickr exports a really big photo at the same time as a really small photo, the smaller photo is going to move a little quicker and is going to show up in your Inkubook photo collection first.
The largest impact here is going to be on the new Inkubook Autofill feature (a topic that we’ll touch on in a future post). The happy coincidence is that Autofill is great at grouping photos, and importng them from Flickr in the order they were photographed makes this even better.

The Benefit of Being a Pro

Finally, there are benefits to being a Pro. At Flickr, that means, in addition to all of the other pluses, that Inkubook can import your full size image, which will work in virtually all of our photo templates. For those who are not Pro members, we are only able to access the large size, which is a 1024 pixels wide, and may cause a few of those annoying low resolution alerts to appear.

Flickr and Inkubook are pretty much a match made in heaven. With a little forethought, you can use some of the tools and resources within Flickr to make the process of building your photo book all that much easier.

This week at Inkubook, we’re celebrating Flickr and all of the sweet functionality they bring to to the process of building your Inkubook. To commemorate the occasion, we’re extending a Free Book Offer to Flickr members. To find out all of the details visit our special Flickr page on Inkubook.com.

Personally, I think that Flickr and Inkubook make a pretty heroic combination, so much so that I was inspired to build a little comic to walk you through the process of getting your photos from Flickr in to your drop-dead gorgeous photo book.

Checkout the comic here.

In their FAQs, Picnik describe themselves thusly:

Picnik is photo editing awesomeness, online, in your browser. It’s the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos.

Seems like it would be tough to undersell yourself in a paragraph that uses the phrase “photo editing awesomeness,” but that’s just what Picnik does here. I previously posted on using GIMP to edit your images. While extremely powerful, GIMP is likely a little more tool than most users need. That is where Picnik comes in. Picnik offers the standard tools for rotating, cropping, and resizing your images, plus it has some additional tools like color adjustments, red-eye reduction and sharpening. All these things can be very valuable, but they don’t exactly exemplify “photo editing awesomeness.” The awesomeness comes in under the “Create” tab, where you can access a slew of filters and enhancements that achieve stunning effects with absolutely minimal effort.

Panography-ish Filter – Create Effects within Picnik

The interface for Picnik is perhaps the most usable I have seen for an image editing tool, better than even iPhoto. Applying effects is as easy as clicking a button and then playing with the associated sliders (even this description doesn’t do justice to the simplicity). There are 33 effects in total (two of these are available only to Premium Members). The results of all are dead-on and would require some heavy lifting in Phototoshop to achieve.

The samples below demonstrate the results of a handful of my favorite filters:

Original Image

Boost Effect

Cinemascope Effect

1960s Effect

The beauty of Picnik is that it provides an environment where you can play with your images without risk of destroying them, and once you get started it is, quite honestly, hard to stop. Best of all, Picnik is free. Some advanced features, like full-screen mode, additional effects, and the ability to work with a greater number of photos, are available for a $24.95 annual charge. It is a great way to add some awesomeness to the photos in your drop-dead gorgeous Inkubook.

Prior to launching Inkubook, we held a contest for our friends and family to give them the chance to come and check out the site and provide us with feedback. Our second-place winner Brian B. is an event producer in Indianapolis. His book was a commemorative of his daughter Emerson’s first 26 months and excelled in aesthetics and creativity. We took a few minutes to chat with Brian and get his thoughts behind the book and his inspiration.

Q. Tell us about the book.
A. The book is 26 pages featuring one page for each of the months my daughter has been alive. Each page uses a photo from that month of her life. Page one is the first day of her life with the song title “First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes. On page two she is two months and so forth. A calendar across the bottom of the page identifies the month. Each page then has a caption that matches the photo that also happens to be a song title. I made an accompanying CD with each of the songs.

Q. Did you use any tools outside of Inkubook in the creation process?
A. I did. I used Photoshop to make the calendar banner across each photo and to place the text. Inkubook offers text, but doesn’t yet offer the font that I always use when I make something about my daughter. I call it “her” font. I then uploaded each of the images to my book and chose the full-page full-bleed template.

Q. What was your inspiration for this book?
A. It was my mother’s birthday and she doesn’t live close, so she doesn’t often get to see my daughter. I felt this was the perfect way for her to “be there” for all the stages she missed. My mom is sappy and very much into photos of her grandkids and into music, so I thought the combination would be a slam dunk.

Q. And was it?
A. It was. She cried and cried the day it came. She called the entire family to tell them about the book and CD. I’m probably going to have to order a second copy, as she will wear it out.

Q. Will you make another book?
A. Christmas is just around the corner…

Book For Grandma Sherri
Designed & Built by Brian B.

Make Your Own Baby’s First Year Inkubook

At Inkubook, we will frequently encourage you to go make “drop-dead gorgeous” books. We acknowledge that beauty can be in the eye of the beholder, and this might be one of those cases.

I was in the process of tending to my herb garden last night when I encountered a couple of caterpillars (looks like these are Papilio polyxenes) that have set-up camp amidst my parsley. Rather than chasing them off, I decided to grab my camera. The results (a sample of which may be seen at right), I thought, were quite pleasing. One thing led to another, and I went off on a bit of a photo safari – reminiscent of the bug-catching adventures of my childhood – collecting shots of all the miniature inhabitants of my yard.

It turned out to be quite a fun activity, even for a 32-year-old. The next time the kids complain that they have nothing to do, try sending them out on miniature photo safari on their own. The results can be compiled into a fun and educational Inkubook and the next time you encounter our friend Papilio polyxenes you’ll know you’ve got some black swallowtail butterflies in the works.

After posting about Aunt Nancy’s thirty-two-layer lemon bars, it occurred to me that some tips on photographing food would be a good series to run on Inkublog. While I am not going to jump into that now, as luck would have it I did run across a relevant article this evening that was worth sharing.

When shooting food or any other small objects, it helps to set the scene correctly. A tool that helps do so is a light tent or table-top studio that allows for soft, natural lighting and a neutral background without distractions. These can run several hundred dollars if purchased through a reputable photography supplier (and well-known and reputable is the only way to go in this market). Luckily Digital Photography School has a great tutorial on how to build one on the cheap and with readily available materials. Aunt Nancy’s lemon bars can now look better than ever. (via Lifehacker)

Suppose you’re at Inkubook, cruising through making the family cookbook and, “whoa, hold up!” you realize you don’t have any photos of Aunt Nancy’s thirty-two layer lemon bars. You could pull the recipe out and go whip some up, but c’mon they’re thirty-two layers of lemony deliciousness. Surely Nancy’s got some snapshots of them, they’re practically her children after all.

Luckily, Inkubook’s got you covered, with a handy Invite feature. Just click the “Invite Button” on your Home Page, Editor, or Preview page (a sample is on the right). A new window will open where you can add Nancy’s email address (Inkubook can even help you pull it from your Gmail, Yahoo, or LiveMail contacts) and a custom message about that lemon bar picture you need. In no time flat, Nancy will get an email with a shortcut to the family cookboook on Inkubook and a place to submit her photos. She can also preview the book, provide feedback through discussions, and even submit more recipes (like her thirty-three layer banana cream pie – oh the spectacle!). Anything she submits will automatically appear in your editor and you’ll be notified of the submissions through the Activity Summary on your Home Page.

It is a great way to get friends and family to collaborate around a project and to make sure you get all of the pictures and stories you need to build a drop-dead gorgeous book – with as many layers as you’d like.

Ever since we kicked off the building of Inkubook, I have been looking for more and more excuses to get my camera out and start shooting. After all great looking photo books start with great looking photos. The reward has been that the desire to shoot photos has gotten me out to some events that I otherwise would not have attended. In what will be a recurring feature on the Inkublog, I will suggest some opportunities to get out and capture some great shots. To kick things off though, I would love to know what you plan on photographing. Drop a note in the comments and share what your plans are for the coming weekend and the moments you hope to capture.

As for me, I plan on attending the Indiana Microbrewers Festival, because beer and hot days always make for good pictures. If you happen to live in any of the following places, here are some suggestions for what could become your next Inkubook.

• Chicago, IL – Pitchfork Music Festival – The best Indie rock show of the year.
• New York – Siren Music Festival – Stephen Malkmus, Ted Leo, and mermaids.
• San Francisco – Tour de Fat – Bikes and Beer on parade.
• Tampa – The Rays vs. The Jays – The hottest team in baseball followed by an MC Hammer concert (MC Hammer, people!)
• Atlanta – B*ATL – Three words: Civil War Reenactment
• Dallas – Rat Snakes to Rattlers: Live Texas Snakes – Features a snake scavenger hunt. Which is terrifying.
• Columbus – Ohio Strobists Meet at the House of Nightmares – Bring your camera and photograph in a haunted warehouse.
• Toronto – The Virgin Suicides Brawl! – Good old clean Roller Derby fun.
• Col Agnel, France – The site of the only Hors Catégorie (HC) climb in Sunday’s stage 15 of the Tour de France. If you are there, I envy you tremendously.

Of course, you can use any excuse to snap some great pictures for your Inkubook. Even if it is just a quaint picnic on the back porch.