Choosing the Best Photos for Your Photo Books: Avoiding Quality Downgrades

You pick out the perfect combination of photos for your photo book, and they look fantastic displayed on your screen! However, there’s still potential for your printed book to come back with those same images looking blurred, washed out, or a drastically different color.

Selecting high-quality photos is the first step toward ensuring sharp, clear images in photo book printing. But no matter how good your photos are, the service you choose can lower the print quality of your photos.

Let's explore ways to avoid photo quality downgrades in photo books, including how to select high-quality photos, common issues that reduce quality, and how to choose a reputable printing service.

How to Ensure High-Quality Photos for Photo Books

The quality of the photographs you use directly impacts the quality of your printed photo book. Even the best printing services won't make up for a low-quality photo. So, ensuring a high-quality photo book begins with you.

Here are three steps you can take to get your photos perfect for printing:

1. Start with High-Resolution Images

Photo resolution is important because it's all about the detail your photos contain. The higher the resolution, the more detail your images have. Low-resolution photos look blurry and sometimes pixilated — as if they’ve been zoomed in too much.

Photo resolution is measured in dots per inch (dpi) for printing. Your photos need to be at least 300 dpi to ensure clear prints.

Here are some tips to help you get the best resolution:

✓ Use a high-resolution camera (most modern cameras and phones easily meet this requirement)

✓ Save your photos in .jpg/.jpeg or .heic format. file format

✓ Upscale any low-resolution photos using AI-powered software

✘ Don’t crop or enlarge photos to below 300dpi

✘ Avoid using images taken from social media as these have been compressed (shrunk for deliverability)

✘ Don’t use photos that have been emailed (these are compressed)

✘ Avoid screengrabs (these are limited by your monitor's resolution)

2. Calibrate Your Monitor

If you use an older device or you’ve changed your display settings, it’s a good idea to calibrate your screen. This is the process of making sure your computer screen displays colors accurately.

3. Optimize Your Photos

The great thing about digital photography is that you can easily enhance your pictures with editing apps and software. Here are some ways to optimize your photographs:

• Sharpen photographs
• Adjust the hue, saturation, and brightness
• Correct over and underexposed photographs
• Straighten crooked images
• Retouch photos
• Remove unwanted elements
• Apply filters
• Add special effects such as a blurred background

IMPORTANT: Make sure the app you use lets you save your edited photos in a suitable, high-resolution format.

The Mixbook photo book editor has some handy tools for enhancing your photos. These include the ability to adjust colors and add effects, including sepia and 80s! You can also easily flip, rotate, and preposition photos from within the editor. This is especially helpful when there’s no time to use photo editing software and for photos that don’t need much editing.

4. Choose a Reputable Printer Service

Not all printing services are the same, so it’s vital to use a professional service that will give you high-quality results. Printing photo books requires specialized materials and machinery, which not all print services have.

Quality downgrades in photo books are typically due to:

• Inadequate machines. The condition of printing machinery can drastically affect the quality of printed photos. Outdated and poorly maintained machines may cause defects such as smudges, discoloration, and other flaws.
• Low-quality paper. The type of paper drastically affects the quality of your photo books. Low-quality or the wrong paper can cause colors to bleed into each other, fade, and make your photos look far from their best.
• Wrong settings. Incorrect printing settings can cause prints to be out of focus, too dark or too bright, completely off-color, and more. Good quality printing services regularly check their processes to ensure the best quality.
• Ink Quality. Ink is crucial when it comes to printing quality. It's often impossible to get vibrant colors from low-quality ink. High-quality ink is worth its weight and will keep your photos looking great for years.

Here are some tips to help you choose a reputable printing service:

Look for photo book printing experts

Printing photo books isn’t the same as regular photo printing. Companies that specialize in photo book printing have dedicated equipment and the expertise needed to ensure quality results.

Assess their customer service

An amazing customer support team can make all the difference. Reputable companies will be willing to answer questions and should be easy to contact. Immediate support can save you the hassle of scrolling the internet for help if you need it.

Check their reviews and ratings

Customer reviews can give you valuable insight into the quality of a printing service. Look for a high number of reviews and make sure they’re recent. Reviews that specifically mention quality will be most helpful. How a company responds to poor reviews can also be useful.

Your Memories Deserve the Highest Quality

With good preparation and quality printing, you can ensure that your photo books arrive looking as sharp and stunning in print as they did on screen!

At Mixbook, we're committed to delivering flawlessly printed photo books. The New York Times recently named us "The Best Photo Book Service" and highlighted the "vibrant, color-accurate photo quality" of our printed photo books.

So far, our customers (Mixbookers!) have left over 30,000 5-star reviews. We’d be thrilled to make you as happy as they are with one of our beautiful books.

If you're unsure where to start with your photo book, there's a whole community of Mixbookers ready to inspire you!