The personal, coffee table style photo book is rapidly developing into a very popular photo print product and is about to overtake the traditional 6”x4” print as the most common photographic printed output. Rarely has the development of a consumer product progressed as quickly.

FotoInsight of Cambridge, UK launched photo books from an online facility with limited editing features one year ago. This applciation presents a revolution in Photo Book creation – a time saving fade-proof record of precious memories for print. It allows novice and inexperienced users to layout their digital images in full colour double page spread, move, crop and edit pictures to any size and add text freely within the photo book, on the cover and on the book spine.


The Photo Book Software
The software application for the photo book starts with an easy to use assistant. According to FotoInsight the assistant provides a photo book draft layout within 3 minutes, already with a professional look. This helps to create a printed photo album with hundreds of images quickly. Such layouts can still be fully edited; adding pictures one by one or complete folders, a time saving option. The application provides graphic images for backgrounds; nicer though it seems to use own pictures as a background of a page or a full double page spread.

Instead of using the assistant to create a layout, pages can also be designed individually. This allows rotating and skewing images freely. Any picture can be spread across the page or double page from edge to edge, set on its own or as a background. For example land scape and panorama pictures look great across two A4 pages.

FotoInsight also sets a narrow white line around pictures in the book to set them apart from photographic backgrounds, just as usual in professionally edited coffee table style photobooks. The software provides a useful image editor, to edit individual images. It includes tools to move freely, rotate and label images and to adjust brightness, contrast or saturation. The editor in the software also covers red eye removal and automatic contrast adjustment; plus an undo function. It comes handy that the edited images can be saved as a jpeg.

When saving the photo book project the CeWe Photobook Software presented by Fotoinsight offers a different approach. Instead of embedding the image files into a lay-out file (as would happen with a pdf-file for example) the software creates a subfolder where all images are copied into as jpegs. This has the advantage that each individual photo can be post edited with any digital imaging software. It also allows to batch process these images with other applications.

In the age of the digital camera and camera phones people snap away happily taking lots of pictures to remember their special events. However generally these digital images languish on computer hard drives and the personal memory fades as to who, why, where and what the pictures were about.

This is why recently photo albums have seen a revival. FotoInsight have combined the digital age with the growing interest in printed photo albums and taken this to the next step with the CeWe Photo Book – bringing all kinds of new layout tools and making it easier and cheaper to create digital memorybooks with friends and family. According to FotoInsight it doesn’t only print photographs in high quality, but also text is clear, sharp and easy to read. Great for those who like to add ample text to their images.

Convenience and flexibility
FotoInsight offers an independent online photo service, fully flexible to be used with images from any digital camera. According to FotoInsight’s management the online service offers superior quality at lower costs when compared to inkjet printing. "Quality is our priority. All materials we use are subject to extensive testing and are guaranteed by their manufacturers to last 100 years.

This guarantee extends to photo printing on real photographic paper as well as to the CeWe Photo Books", emphasises Dr. Rolf Hollander, CEO of FotoInsight's production partner and Europe's largest photo finisher. FotoInsight offers an extensive array of award-winning photo print and photographic gift items for the consumer, business, photography, and graphic arts markets.

From Cambridge, Mr Brumann comments: “Photographic memories must never fade. Our technology is smarter, providing long lasting Memory Books in superior quality.”