Create Your Own Beautiful Album With Canon hdAlbum Service

This is a Canon sponsored post.

Have you ever had photos that are so beautiful and so precious that only a high quality photo book is worthy of them, but not sure how to get that? Canon has an hdAlbum Service that produces the highest quality books I have ever seen. Let me start by showing you the album I made.

Over the summer we took a family vacation to Hawaii. I have close to 2000 photos and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them.  Many of my photos are gorgeous scenes and I needed a high quality book. I’m not a professional photographer, so I didn’t have access to professional level services, until now!

Pro and Amateur Premium Album Service

I was so excited when I found out about the Canon hdAlbum service. It is available for both pros and amateurs. That meant I could create my book and have the same high quality level of printing as the professionals do.

The books are printed with seven dye-based inks which is what gives you vivid colors. The colors of the images in my book are EXACTLY how I remember them when I was there in person. They print up to 2,400 dots-per-inch (DPI) which gives you the high-quality books in incredible detail.

Choosing Your Album Style

To create your album, you download the hdAlbum Creation Software (for Mac or PC.) There is a thorough product guide to help you along all steps of your album creation.  Pull that up and use it to walk you through the entire process.

Once you have installed the software, you have several choices of books. I created a lay-flat binding option because I knew I was going to have some images that went across both the left and right and I wanted them to look awesome in the book. But you can choose the lay-flat or classic binding.

Lay-flat binding option

Next you can choose between square, rectangle or portrait sizes. Being a digital scrapbooker, I love creating 12×12 sizes, so I chose the square because it was familiar. You can choose whatever fits best with your project.

The easiest way to create the book is to have the wizard start your book. After you choose the photos you want in your book, the wizard will create the book. If you aren’t a wizard type of person, that is ok too….just start completely from scratch.

TIP: Before I started my book, I went through all my photos from our trip and copied the ones I wanted in my book in a new folder. I put that folder on my desktop for easy access. Choosing the photos took longer than creating the book!

Customizing Your Album

Once the wizard creates the book, you can edit it as much or as little as you want. If you don’t like the page layout, you can change it

You can choose from a colored background like the black in the above photo or a background with a design like the photo below. Each page can have a different background or the entire album can be the same. I tested different backgrounds to see how they would print.

The most photos I put on a page was five, but you can customize this too.

Similar to scrapbook pages, you can add extra elements to the pages to fit your theme. In the page below, I added a starfish element.

My favorite layouts are the ones on the black background with the border around the photos.

And of course you can add as much or as little text to the book as desired.

The photos are on the left side and the number shows you how often that photo was used in the book. That was a life saver for me. I had a lot of photos and I didn’t want to use them more them once.

When you are done, you can preview the book in full screen to be sure everything looks exactly how you want it.

TIP: Do not skip the last step of looking over the book in the full screen mode. I caught a few errors or photos that didn’t look the way I wanted them to while going through this last step.

Printing Your Book

The software easily walks you through the process of sending the book and having it printed. If you run into problems, call customer service and they will help you.

You can see all your current  projects. I love that you can duplicate a project you completed if you want to create another similar book. You don’t need to start from scratch.

The production phase takes about 3-5 business days and the shipping will vary depending on the shipping service you chose and your location.

Quality of the Printing

The book is GORGEOUS! The moment I pulled the book out of the box, I could feel the high quality in the cover. It’s a sturdy book with durable binding. I went with a matte finish on my pages and I love how it looks and feels.

My husband is a bit of a photo snob when it comes to printing. I was curious to see how he would like it. He gushed over the book and was very impressed. He wants me to make more books.

I want a book that is beautiful and will last a long time. I want to feel that I can put it out on my coffee table and have everyone open it up and look at it. I want my kids to be able to show it off to friends. THIS book does that.

Go ahead and download the Canon hdAlbum photo creation software (it’s free and available for PC or Mac) and start a book from storefront.dl5k.com by selecting a retailer near you. Canon is currently offering promotions for up to 40% off until January 15, 2016. Start creating a book right now!

Disclosure: This is a sponsored post by Canon. All views and opinions expressed are unbiased and based on my personal experience.