Designing a Photo eBook with Adobe InDesign
So I was browsing one of my favourite photography blogs, Digital-Photography-School.com a little while ago and came across an inspirational article by Neil Creek (read it here) about presenting your photographs professionally in a photo eBook and thought; Why not give it a go myself?
The original article by Neil describes the benefits of creating an eBook along with design decisions to think about, suggested design software and so on, but this was the first time I had used any such software so I thought I would share the steps I took with InDesign to create my finished eBook. (Download my eBook here)
As a newcomer to InDesign most of my learning was around the Master Pages concept, so I hope this step-by-step can help guide you if this is your first time with the software.
1: Create a new document
After downloading and installing InDesign, the first step was to create a new document. After selecting File>New>Document from the menu, I went with the following settings:
Points to note here are:
Page Size: A4
Orientation: Landscape
Facing Pages: Ticked
2: Set up your page templates
Templates in InDesign are called “Master Pages” and you can find them by opening the pages tab:
The benefit of master pages is that you can design your page layouts once and use them repeatedly throughout your document with just a couple of clicks. So I started with creating a new blank master page by right-clicking in the upper section of the pages tab and selecting the “New Master…” option, choosing to create a 1 page master in the subsequent popup box.
My “B-Master” master page was created and had appeared on the list so I double-clicked it to place it in my workspace.
First thing to do was set the background colour. To do this I created a coloured box using the rectangle tool from the tools palette, fitting it to the edges of the page.
Next, I created another rectangle (with the default fill and stroke selected) as a placeholder for a photo, drawing the outline, right-clicking on the highlighted box and then selecting Content>Graphic to designate it’s use for later.
Then, I placed a text box at the bottom of the page which I would later use for a simple caption below the photo. To do this simply select the text tool from the palette, drag your text box into position, select the font size and colour options and then type some holding text.
At this point you could place any other boxes, lines or text etc on the page that you wish. I opted for adding a simple frame around the edge of the photo box with another rectangle.
The following screenshot shows my master page as it looked at this stage:
Once I had got my first master page built, I then created a second. The easiest way to do this is to click and hold on the master page as it appears in the Pages tab and then drag it down onto the New Page icon just below:
By creating a new master page in this way you are duplicating the first one you have created, enabling you to use it as baseline for your second master page. This helps in keeping boxes in line from page to page, re-selecting colours etc and just generally saves you time.
For my second master page it was just a matter of resizing the boxes, copying and pasting those boxes back into the page and resizing/positioning them as necessary until I was happy with the layout. InDesign has some really nice snapping features when you are moving items around the page which really helps in lining up your layout – the best thing to do is just try it out and see what I mean as I’m not sure how well I could explain it… My second master page looked like this:
After this it was just a matter of repeating the process for as many page layouts as I required.
3: Filling your eBook
Once I had all my master pages laid out it was then a matter of creating some blank pages in my document and applying the masters to them. You can create pages in your document by clicking on the new page icon in the pages tab. Due to the checkbox that I ticked when creating my new document labelled “Facing Pages”, when I create pages in my document the first page appears alone but then subsequent pages are created side by side – as if it were a real book that you can flick through. This is much easier described visually:
Applying Templates
To apply a template to each of my pages I click-dragged each template from the upper section of the pages tab and dropped it on the corresponding page in the lower section. Each page was then labeled in with the prefix of the master page that I had assigned to it (thats the A in the corner of each page in the screenshot above).
Now by double-clicking on a page in the lower section of the pages tab you can bring it into your workspace and begin to fill it with content.
Side note: As a matter of personal preference I left the front page without a template as I figured that I would only be laying it out once and that it would be different from any of the inner pages of my book.
Adding Your Images
There are various ways of placing photos into your document but the quickest way I found was to have a separate windows explorer window open displaying my photos and to drag each one from there into InDesign, dropping them straight into the desired box on my page. To explain a little further, when you are viewing your files in windows explorer you can drag a photo down onto the InDesign tab on the taskbar, holding it there a few moments until the screen switches windows to InDesign and then dragging it up into position in InDesign before dropping it onto your page.
Depending on the size of your photo you may need to adjust the fitting of it within the box on your page. Once I had put a photo in place and making sure that the Selection Tool was selected (the very top arrow in the tools palette) I then selected it by left-clicking on it once and then with a right-click I selected Fitting>Fit Content To Frame. This had the effect of ensuring the photo filled the frame exactly.
Depending on your photo’s dimensions, this process may or may not stretch or squash your photo and distort it. If this happens for you then I would reccommend trying some of the other options available in the Fitting menu option.
Adding Text
You can edit your pre-positioned text boxes simply by selecting the text tool from the tools palette, clicking onto one of the text boxes on your page and then deleting the placeholder text, replacing it with the words you wish to display. The font style, size and colour will be pre-determined by the template so you all you have to do is replace the words.
Finishing Off
I simply ended my ebook with a page stating my name and contact details along with some copyright info. Of course, you can feel free to add any extra information you like to yours as required.
4: Exporting to PDF
You can add embedded information to your eBook such as tags/keywords, copyright info, author details and a whole lot more in the File>File Info menu – I would highly reccommend checking those options out before exporting your eBook.
There are many formats which you could export your finished eBook to – I chose PDF for mine. Firstly I chose File>Export from the menu and then gave my eBook a filename. Then in the export options which I was presented with, I checked the settings in 2 of the tabs; General and Compression.
Under the General tab, I ensured that the “All” and “Spreads” options were checked under the “Pages” section.
Then under the Compression tab I went with the following settings:
Reducing the pixels per inch settings drastically reduced my finished file size, from around 9MB to around 2MB in this case.
I don’t think I changed any other settings than these, but I may have missed something out as it’s been a few days between me creating my eBook and actually writing this article so my apologies if there turns out to be something I didnt mention.
5: Final Thoughts
When it came to picking out photo’s to use for my eBook, I just happened to have a set laying around that I’d taken at my local zoo thatI could use. I tried to follow some basic rules in ensuring that the photos on each page worked well together in colour and feel and that the animals were generally facing into the page, but I began to run out of photos that fit towards the end of my eBook!
I drew a lot of inspiration for the look and feel of my eBook from the author of the original article’s one, so if I were to attempt this again I would definitely try out a few of my own ideas – I think at the time I was just so curious to see if I could work InDesign that I didn’t want to wait around trying to get creative!
Well, the rest is down to you! Give it a go for yourself and see what you think. Personally I was very impressed with how in a few simple steps you can create a very professional looking eBook to showcase your photographs.
Thanks for reading!
