Author Archives: Steve Walker

About Steve Walker

Once a tech in-house PR type, now professional photo/videographer and recreational drone pilot. Violinist. Flautist. Occasional conductor. Oenophile.

Photobook Service Review – Saal Digital

Background – Why am I reviewing a Photobook offering?

Saal Digital is a manufacturer of photo products, based in Vienna, Austria. It offers a wide variety of ways to get photos into print – Wall Decorations, Cards, Posters, Photos and, the topic of this post, Photobooks. The company’s proposition to selected photographers was this – review their offering and publicise the review on social media in return for a discount voucher to be redeemed against its Professional Line Photobook offering.

Executive Summary

The TL;DR, if you’re in a hurry, is this – I recommend the service. I used their Windows-based photobook editing package, which is powerful, flexible and responsive, and took delivery of a high quality book of photographs printed on fine art paper in a linen-feel cover. The service I got from their support desk was responsive and helpful. I noticed that the images as printed were darker than they appeared on my PC, but on investigation, I feel this is a calibration issue with my display.

A couple of comments: firstly, with such great flexibility in the book editing package, one can get bogged down in the creation process. The website provides several (excellently short) video tutorials to help the novice make sense of what can be a bewildering set of possibilities. I thoroughly recommend that anyone using the service check these out to make the creation process go smoothly.

Secondly, I recommend the service, but if you want top quality, be prepared to plan ahead. I completed the book on 30th April (56 pages of images) and was quoted a delivery time of 13th May. The book actually arrived on 11th May and is of very fine quality. The above issue with darkness aside, I’m very happy with the way the images have come out on the fine art paper, with some great colours and detail.

(By way of comparison, Photobox suggests a delivery time of 6-11 days, but their top quality offering, whilst very good, is not as fine as the Saal Digital Pro Line, but then It’s slightly cheaper. Photobox are in the habit of offering deep discounts if you’re prepared to keep an eye out and wait; so you can do a perfectly good photo book with Photobox for less than Saal Digital’s price. But Saal Digital has offerings of superior quality.)

If you look very very closely at the book I received, it’s possible to see that the images on the left-hand pages are very slightly misaligned, with the top left edge being a fraction nearer the top of the page than the top right edge. You have to look carefully to notice it, and I suspect that my selected layout was unwise, with the images very near the top of each page, making it possible to spot this. So my advice would be to steer a little clearer of the top of the page than I did.

Read on if you’re interested in more detail.

The detail

Having been accepted into this scheme, my original idea was to use a forthcoming holiday to Jordan as the subject matter for the book. However, nature, in the form of the SARS-COV-2 virus, intervened and kyboshed that plan. However, there are many ways a photographer can get benefit from lockdown, and one of these is to revisit photographs from previous projects. I have used Photobox, a UK-based service, for previous books and been satisfied with the results for a high-quality portfolio book. So I decided to use the Saal Digital proposition as a reason to revisit my portfolio, re-edit some of those photos and also select and re-edit new ones for inclusion in a second portfolio book. Like the first, it would be based around photos I had taken on my travels over the last ten years.

The Process

Select your book

The Saal Digital Windows-based photobook editor is a very comprehensive tool. The process is driven by selecting images, which are displayed in the PC’s folder structure in a windows on the left. But before you select your images, you need to have a clear idea in your mind as to what kind of book – an “article” in its terminology – you’re going to produce. (As well as a photo book, an article could be some individual photos, wall decor, cards, posters and a variety of other possibilities.)

Within the Photo Book selection, a variety of options are on offer, from basic photo booklet through to so-called “Professional Line” Photobooks. These are offered in a variety of different formats – square, portrait or landscape, with the largest being a 40×30 Landscape offering. I elected to go for the 30×21 Landscape format, which is a similar size to the Photobox offering I’d done previously.

Having selected this option, the software asked for a choice of cover, for example, acrylic or leather/linen, the cover surface, what kind of paper (glossy, matte, fine art) and whether a gift box is required. Some covers can feature photos, others only text. A starting price for your selection is displayed, and which adjusts as you change options or change the number of pages in the book.

You then have three options – a “one-minute” photobook, where the software does all the work for you, “auto layout” which places images within a layout of your choice or an empty template so that you can have complete control (which was my selection). There are tutorial videos, helpfully each only around one minute long, to explain how each works and how you can manipulate the format as you go along. I recommend watching a couple of these videos as they might give you some ideas as to clip art or layout selections before you begin.

The final step is to select the number of pages you want in your photobook. You can add pages later, so you’re not committed to a number; but this step does give you an idea of what the final cost is going to be.

Select and place your images and text

You’re then in the hands of the layout section of the software, which shows you the current page you’re editing in the centre, a window of all of the book pages on the bottom, your folder structure on the left, a set of tools at the top and some resources on the right (so you can change your article type if you wish, for example, or select page layouts). You are also shown thumbnails of any images in the directory you’re looking at. I did all my photo edits before I started, so all the photos were in one directory, which I think made the whole process a lot simpler.

The look and feel of the tool corresponds closely to the Windows look and feel, so you can select multiple images with Ctrl-click or Shift-click as you would in Windows, and there’s a right-click menu of options as well. For example, if you’re using the one-minute option, you could just select all the images and drag-and-drop them on to the current page window and the software will do the rest. You have flexibility in adjusting things afterwards if you want – and this applies to auto layout as well.

I used a one-photo-per-page approach, so merely had to drag a selected photo across, then position it, size it and caption it. Once you’ve elected to use a photo, the software places a tick against it in the thumbnail view, so that you can easily see which images you have used and which not. The software gives an assessment of the image quality for printing and will for example alert you if it’s too small; you also are alerted if you’re trespassing too near the edge of the page. Having positioned the image, I could then edit it further if I wished (rotate, mirror, etc, or adjust the colours and brightness. The menus at the top are all context-sensitive, so appear as needed when you select an object to adjust. You can copy or cut-and-paste easily between pages, which I found useful in keeping consistency in layout and positioning of captions.

The software really is very good and very flexible. It is possible to do sophisticated layouts with layered images, rotated images, a wide variety of text tools and clip art. This is why I suggest you have a clear idea of how you want your book to look before you start – there are so many options and possibilities here that it’s easy to get bogged down. The tutorial videos are very useful preparation, I found.

As you create the book, the pages are visible in a window along the bottom so that you can easily skip from one page to another. A preview of the book is available so you can see how it looks thus far; and you can save the project so that you can come back later if you need to take a break.

All in all, I found it very easy to get exactly the look I wanted

Finish and buy

And that’s it! At the bottom right is an indication of the price of your book, including VAT but excluding shipping costs and the tempting “Add to shopping basket” button, which will take you to a dialog for giving shipping and payment information – credit card and PayPal options are available. If there are any last-minute issues with your layout (e.g. page accidentally left blank), the software will alert you before allowing you to spend money, which is a nice touch.

It’s a very smooth process, and the finished article, with the one layout caveat I mention above, is of very high quality – lovely image colour and detail. Overall, a very satisfactory project and I shall revisit the service for any top quality photo print items I need in the future.

How good are photos from mobile phones these days?

1. Picture quality in challenging light

No real surprises here – of course a phone, with its much smaller sensor, is going to struggle if the light is not good. Here’s a marked example. I took a photo of the same scene, inside Palma Cathedral on Mallorca, on two different cameras – a Nikon D500 (RAW) and my phone (JPEG). I then processed them both using DxO Photolab 2 to get the best out of them and also to make them comparable in scene coverage.

This is the one taken on my phone, handheld.

and here is the one from the Nikon.

The difference in quality is immediately obvious, as one would expect. Actually, the phone did a remarkably good job, all things considered.

2. Picture quality in good light

Here are two photos taken at Catell Bellver in Palma, again, one on the Nikon and one on the phone.

You can hardly tell that the first one is from the Nikon and the second from the phone, can you?

Well, actually it’s the other way round. The first one is from my phone and the second one from the Nikon. An expert would be able to spot that at once, but there really isn’t a lot wrong with the one from the phone – slightly blown highlights in bottom centre is all. Certainly as a holiday snap the phone did a perfect job; you’d have to be really picky to mark it down.

And again, actually, this isn’t the whole story, because the phone did an overall better job. I haven’t told you the whole story…..

3. Field of view – wide angle

Here’s the actual complete image that the phone captured

I used the inbuilt panorama feature on the phone in portrait mode (i.e. phone held upright) so that I got a much wider angle effect. And I think that, artistically it’s a more arresting photo.

I could have created the same thing with the Nikon, but I would have needed to change all the settings to manual, take probably a dozen photos and then stitch them together manually. I would have got technically a better image in terms of depth of detail, but at the cost of much time and patience. Definitely a win for the phone, here.

4. Field of view – Zoom

Now we come to the area where I believe it will be a long time before phones can catch up with larger cameras – taking photos of distant objects.

On our walks in the mountains above our hotel we noticed what looked like an observatory on top of a distant peak. Here’s the picture the phone takes of the scene with the phone in normal mode

and you can’t really see the observatory at all. (Here, for comparison photos, is a similar picture using the Nikon:

which has more detail in it but is not inherently a vastly superior technical capture.)

Now the S9+ has a 2x optical zoom capability; using it gives you this:

You can now make out the observatory. I had the Nikon with me (despite having to lug it up a bloody mountain!) and so was able to use its capabilities to get closer to the scene:

To be specific, I had a lens which was capable of a 15x zoom. To get that picture on the phone would have been quite impossible; I could have zoomed in by what the phone tells me is 10x but it’s a digital zoom and so the resulting picture would look like this

and if you look in detail, you’ll see blurring because of the phone effectively trying to make a small photo larger.

5. Video

No contest. If I wanted to do even slightly decent video, (a) the Nikon D500 is not the right camera (it’ll do video but to be frank, DSLRs and video don’t really mix without a whole load of gear and a crew to wield it, and (b) even if I’d had my mirrorless Z6 – a better choice for video – I would have needed to lug gimbal or tripod with me as well). I could (and did) carry a small gimbal for the phone (an Osmo Mobile 3 – highly recommended) and get decent quality handheld video, such as this:

(I did take another camera with me for those occasions when video and zoom might be needed – a Panasonic TZ100 and a Zhiyun Crane M2. In Barcelona there was a particular event I wanted to capture and I knew that zoom would be needed and that combination did an OK job:

So, was it worth taking all that gear on holiday?

In sum, yes. I could have captured a decent set of images on the phone and they would provide good memories; but by taking a variety of gear, I got reasonably good results in a wide variety of situations – not perfect, not “professional”, but a lot better than I could have got using just the phone, and of a quality that I am happy to share publicly.

My shoulders ached, but my soul was satisfied.

Abroad thoughts from home

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Now we’re back home, here are some random thoughts about the three weeks we spent in the eastern corner of Iberia.

Barcelona

I was worried, before we arrived there, about its reputation for crime. It’s possible I may have been lucky or simply unperceptive (the latter having a high degree of probability), but at no stage did I feel uncomfortable or threatened, even in the crowds of the castellers festival or the metro.
Barcelona is a very rewarding place simply to walk around. It’s justly famous for many things, but I found that the unexpectedly quirky things one stumbles upon were delightful.
It’s very crowded. Anything which is on the main tourist trail will likely be packed unless you’re there in very low season. Don’t just rock up, book in advance.

Mallorca

Also crowded. We were there right at the end of the season, and the main tourist attractions were still full of people. This was a noticeable change from our previous visit, some 25 years ago, and it took some getting used to.
A significant consequence of no. 1 is that parking can be really problematical. This is something to bear in mind if you hire a car when you’re there.
Hiring a car is a good idea – it’s quite a large island, and the public transport is not comprehensive, so a car is a good way to see the sights. But if you do, make sure, if possible, that it is (a) small (to fit into small parking spaces), (b) powerful (to help with some really steep mountain roads – for the narrowness of which a small car might also be an advantage) and (c) automatic, as incessantly having to change gear up and down said mountain roads is wearisome.
The second language of the island is German. It is ridiculous that I was surprised at the popularity of the island with German tourists.

Menorca

Whilst Mallorca is a good place for a holiday, Menorca felt much more like somewhere nice to live. That’s, obvs, a very personal feeling, and it’s based on a short period of observation when the weather was perfect. Apparently it’s cold, windy and wet in the winter, thus maybe not worth leaving the UK for then, as you can experience that much more cheaply at home. But I really liked the Menorcan vibe.
That said, beside some nice beaches, pleasant walks and the megalithic sites, there’s not a lot to do there, particularly if you’re relying on the buses to get around. It’s probably worth hiring a car if you want easily to experience the island’s highlights. We felt this particularly keenly as we were there in October, and the bus services to the extremities are very limited after the end of September.
If we come again to the Balearics, we’re much more likely to stay in Menorca than Mallorca.

Three weeks, then, in three different places, each with its unique vibe and nicely complementing each other – major city, major tourist island, minor tourist island. We’ve seen facets of each that we hadn’t seen before and our lives are the better for it.