Greenerprinter Photo Book User Guide

Introducing Greenerprinter Photo Books, a fun way to preserve and present your cherished photo memories in an elegant manner. Creating your very own customized photo books has never been easier!

Greenerprinter Photo Books offers a wide array of tools and features to design and enhance your project, including:

Brief overview of how to create a photo book:

Double-click the Photo Books application icon (shown above).
A "Welcome" dialog will appear. Click "Create New Book."

Currently, we offer one size of book: 8.5x11 landscape, with a "keyhole" window on a hard-bound cover that reveals an image on the first page of your book. NOTE: All photo books have a minimum of 24 pages & a maximum of 68 pages.

You should now see the Photo Book workspace. Use the Image Browser at the bottom of the workspace to load pictures to use in your photo book. To do this, click the "Add Picture" or "Add Folder" (of pictures) icon at the left of the Image Browser. You can then drag & drop pictures directly from the Image Browser into your photo book pages.

If you are using layouts or templates, you can use the "Distribute Pictures" command (under the Layout menu) to automatically distribute your pictures amongst the pages.

Toggle between the various page display options seen as tabs on the Image Browser: All of these items can be dragged & dropped directly onto a page (or frame, as the case may be).

Photo Book Tips

Book Monitor
Using the Book Monitor feature, you can monitor any potential problems that may arise in your photo book in real-time. Such issues include image resolution problems, default caption text, empty pages and empty picture boxes. By default, the Book Monitor is set to "on". If the Book Monitor has been turned off, go to the View menu and click "Show Book Monitor."

A new bar will appear underneath the photo book pages scrollbar. If everything is 100% fine within your book, the bar will be blank. If however, there are issues with any page, color-coded boxes will appear for those pages with errors.

The color of the arrow at the left indicates the most serious of the problems within the book. Placing the cursor over a color-coded error box will display a page's problems, and allow you to go directly to the page to make changes.

Multiple problems on a single page with the same color-code will be represented by a single box of the pertinent color.

Two-Page Spreads
Any of your pictures can be used as a background for a two-page spread. Just drag a picture from the Image Browser to a page (but not onto a frame), and when asked "Would you like your picture to be used as a background for a single page, or across a two-page spread?" click the Two-Page Spread button.


Example of a 2-page spread photo

Adjusting & cropping your pictures:



Black & white and sepia filters, fading:



Aligning Pictures:


Removing & duplicating frames/pictures:

Designing pages in Adobe Photoshop®

If you plan to design some or all of your pages in Adobe Photoshop®, there are a few more things you need to know:

Bleed - when one or more sides of a printed image touch the edge of the paper. The use of bleed guarantees that the finished (cropped) page will look neat & precise. The page bleed allowance should be 1/8 inch at all four sides of the page. The bleed area (i.e. beyond the crop marks) will be trimmed off. If you use a background color or image, it should fill the entire page including the bleed area. For example, if your printed page size is 8.3 inch wide, your page design should be 8.55 inch wide with the bleed (1/8" + 8.3" + 1/8").


2 Page Spread - this is a page design than spans both right & left-hand pages. The pages are centered at the gutter where they are bound into the spine. Approximately 1/4" of the spread will be bound into (and thus hidden within) the spine. This, in and of itself, is not a problem, but it does require a bit of special attention when using an external tool, such as Adobe Photoshop to create your page designs:

• Be sure to leave bleed on all 4 sides. The My Photo Books software will automatically adjust any background used as if it has a bleed designed into it.
• Keep important design details at least 1/8" from all sides of the page (1/4" is even better) so that unwelcome trimming does not occur.
• Keep important design details an extra 1/4" away from the center binding (this is in addition to the bleed you leave on all 4 sides of the page). This is an issue specifically for single page designs.
• The software will adjust the spread pages for the 1/4" lost within the spine. To this end, the spread should be designed to be 1/4" smaller than the size that it would be if you were to include the gutter. Also, keep in mind that although page spreads are well suited for panoramic picture backgrounds, fine details may be partially obscured within the binding.

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