Print quality
Colour, paper, ink and binding, in detail
Most complaints about photo books come down to four things: washed-out skin, soft images, a spine that cracks, and pages that yellow. Here is exactly what we do about each of them.
00 · How the pages are imaged
Three ways to put a photograph on paper
This is the single biggest factor in how a book looks, and almost nobody in this category will tell you which one they use. We sell all three and label every edition with its process and its resolution.
Digital press
300 dpi
Printed on a digital press by our production partner (Prodigi prints on HP Indigo presses). Photos are placed at 300 dpi. This is what our Softcover, Classic Hardcover and Linen Hardcover editions use.
Right for: nearly everything: family books, travel, yearbooks, gifts.
Photographic
400 dpi, continuous tone
Not ink at all. The paper is exposed to red, green and blue light and developed in chemistry, exactly as a darkroom print is, so there is no dot structure anywhere and nothing for a gradient to band against.
Right for: portraiture and weddings: anywhere skin has to be flawless.
Giclée
1200 dpi, 12 inks
Twelve pigment inks, including three greys and two blacks, sprayed onto cotton rag. The widest colour range and deepest blacks we can produce, and the extra greys are what stop monochrome work picking up a colour cast.
Right for: fine-art editions, gallery catalogues, black-and-white work.
| Edition | Process | Resolution | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Softcover | Digital press | 300 dpi | 80# White, Coated (other sizes differ) |
| Classic Hardcover | Digital press | 300 dpi | 80# White, Coated (other sizes differ) |
| Linen Hardcover | Digital press | 300 dpi | 60# White, Uncoated |
| Lay-Flat Premium | Digital press | 300 dpi | Mounted board pages, specification by enquiry |
| Photographic Lay-Flat | True photographic (silver-halide) | 400 dpi | WHCC Photo Lustre photographic paper |
| Archival Heirloom | Digital press | 300 dpi | 100% cotton rag, specification by enquiry |
| Giclée Atelier | Giclée, 12-ink pigment | 1200 dpi | Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 100% cotton |
A higher process cannot rescue a low-resolution photograph: it will render the softness more faithfully. Resolution of your files and resolution of our press are separate problems; the builder handles the first, this page is about the second.
01 · Colour
Skin tones are the whole test
A press that renders a blue sky beautifully can still make a pale face look grey and a dark face look orange. Skin sits in the hardest part of the gamut, and it is the part everyone notices.
- Colour calibration is done by our production partners on their own presses. We do not run the presses ourselves, so we do not claim a calibration schedule we cannot show you.
- Your photos go into the print file as you uploaded them, resampled to 300 ppi for the size they print at. We do not add filters or brighten them.
- The honest test is paper in your hands: the sample kit has a printed swatch of each paper stock.
02 · Resolution
We will not print a photo that cannot survive the size
A 640-pixel screenshot looks fine on a phone and terrible across a 12-inch spread. Every upload is measured against the trim size you chose, at the size it will actually be placed.
300+ DPI
Press quality. Fine detail, clean edges, no visible softening at any size the photo is placed.
100 to 180 DPI
Usable small, soft large. The builder marks it and suggests a smaller cell: your call, made with the facts in front of you.
<100 DPI
Genuinely unprintable at this size. We stop the order rather than take your money for a blurry book and argue about it afterwards.
Screenshots, WhatsApp forwards and images saved from social media are the usual culprits: all three re-compress and shrink the original. If you can find the file the photo came from, use that instead; the builder will tell you immediately whether it helped.
03 · Paper
The stocks our production partners print on
Named the way the printer names them. Where a printer publishes no weight, we do not invent one.
| Stock | Weight | Surface | Best for | Editions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 80# White, Coated | 80# | Smooth, high opacity | Photo books and image-heavy pages, as the printer describes it | Softcover at 8.5 × 8.5, 8.5 × 11 and 11 × 8.5; Classic Hardcover at 8.5 × 8.5 |
| Gloss | 150 / 200 gsm | Glossy, bright colour | Colour photographs with a shine; 200 gsm in hardcovers, 150 gsm in softcovers | Classic Hardcover at 8.5 × 11, 11 × 8.5 and A4; Softcover at A4 portrait |
| 60# White, Uncoated | 60# | Papery, no sheen | A quiet page with no glare under a lamp | Linen Hardcover |
| Photo Lustre photographic paper | Not published | Lustre photographic finish | Portraits and skin tones in a thick-page lay-flat album | Photographic Lay-Flat |
| Mounted board, cotton rag | By enquiry | By enquiry | Not made by our current production partners; we quote these by enquiry | Lay-Flat Premium, Archival Heirloom, Giclée Atelier |
04 · Binding
A spine is a mechanism, not a decoration
The difference between a book you reread and one that lives in a cupboard is usually whether it opens without a fight.
Perfect bound (Softcover)
Pages milled at the spine and glued into a wrapped cover with a flexible PUR adhesive rather than the brittle hot-melt used for paperbacks. It opens further than you expect and does not shed pages.
Case bound (Classic & Linen Hardcover)
Sections sewn, then glued, then cased into board covers with endpapers. The sewing is what stops the block cracking away from the spine after a hundred openings.
Lay-flat (Premium & Heirloom)
Each spread is a single sheet mounted to board and hinged to its neighbours. There is no gutter to lose an image into, and the book stays open on a table by itself.
05 · Longevity
What “archival” has to mean before we will print the word
The term is unregulated and freely abused. On this site it refers only to the Archival Heirloom edition, and it means these four specific things.
Acid-free, lignin-free
Cotton rag has no residual acid and no lignin to break down, which is what turns cheap paper brown from the edges inwards.
Pigment, not dye
Ground mineral particles sitting on the surface rather than soluble dye soaking in, which resists fading far better than dye.
No optical brighteners
OBAs make paper look whiter now and yellower in twenty years as they burn off. Ours has none, so the white you receive is the white it stays.
Quoted, not promised in advance
Archival Heirloom is made by enquiry. The exact materials, and what we can promise about them, are written into the quote for your book.
06 · Materials sourcing
What we can say about materials
Print is a physical product. We only state what our production partners publish about their own materials.
- Prodigi, which makes our A4 and letter-size books, describes its book paper as sustainably sourced
- Lulu, which makes our 8.5 × 8.5 in books, is a certified B Corporation
- Books are printed to order: we hold no speculative stock and pulp nothing
What every edition gets, regardless of price
- The same layout tools and the same print file
- Full-bleed printing: photos run to the trim edge
- The same resolution checking before anything is printed
- A human looking at the book before it is boxed
- The same reprint guarantee if anything is wrong
The tiers differ in materials and construction. They do not differ in care.
Do not take our word for any of this
The sample kit puts every cover material and a printed swatch of each paper stock in your hands before you order.