Photobooks are nice!
2018-02-06 | 3 mins | Bobtags: photography, opinion
After a long time not printing any of my photographs I thought about it again. Keeping everything digitally has a lot of advantages for sure but photography should be something more reachable, something you can hold in your hands at any time.
So I took myself some time to search for great ways of printing, always thinking about photo books. I didn’t want those typical ones everyone orders after their recent summer holiday to put in all the pictures they can find on their smartphone. The products often come with awful designs and weird print options which seem to be dedicated to the mentioned average user. In addition to that, hardbacked booklets feel a bit narrow to me. They just don’t feel like they’re representing the freedom you can find in photography. Trying out new suppliers is often the way to go if you want to discover all possibilities. The company Saal Digital (@saal_digital) recently gave me that opportunity and offered me to test one of their products.
Starting with checking out their website confused me a bit because I saw all the nicely presented products including examples and price tables but nothing where you can start uploading your photos you wish to get some prints from. The only way I could find in the first place was by downloading their software. I don’t want to loose too many words about it here but it is nice and easy to understand. By using it you’re able to work on your projects offline — which is important for me because I’m often working away from home. My order was delivered within the next three days which I also appreciated.
To come to the photo book itself, I have to say that I ordered pretty much the smallest version you can get — I just wanted to test it out to be able to decide if I can take Saal Digital into consideration in future or not.
My ordered photo book is printed on artpaper. The pages are held together by a spiral binding. The paper has a nice texture which feels great and kind of soft. It gives the product a professional touch. To check the reproduction of tones, I’ve chosen photos with a decent variety of colors. They are on point and not over or under-saturated. I also included some photographs with a black backdrop. Unfortunately they turned out a bit underwhelming. Pure black doesn’t look as deep as it should. I guess its because of the paper type and a glossy choice would have represented the blacks more accurately. All pages including front and back are printable from edge to edge — even the parts covered by the spiral binding. I really like that. The book is protected by matt but transparent plastic sheets.
To come to a conclusion I can say that Saal Digital is offering high quality and cleanly processed products to present your work. Next time I would pay more attention to available paper types if I want really deep blacks on my prints. Below you can see some photos of the book.