My Light Painting photo book with Saal Digital

I tried the service offered by Saal Digital to print a photo-book with some of my creations in light painting. Result? Fantastic!

This summer I took advantage of a promotional offer with a discount code offered by the online printing service Saal Digital to be able to "touch" the photos taken up to July and evaluate their performance on photographic paper.

Night photos have always been a great challenge for those who print, both because you risk having blacks "too black" and losing details, and because the illuminated parts can appear "fluttering" and no, this doesn't have to happen. An even more difficult challenge when it comes to portraits made with light painting in which every color, every detail is very important to maintain the desired effect.

And as is often said, I rightly add, it is one thing to see a photo on the screen, it is another thing to appreciate it in print.

Create a Light Painting photo book

For some time I had wanted to make a draft of a photo-book and I got a promotion from Saal Digital which, in exchange for a review, gave away 30 euros. Interesting, I immediately joined and once I received the confirmation email from the staff I went to work.

Saal Digital provides a very clear and intuitive computer application. If at the beginning this puzzled me, comparing with other services that allow you to create your own product via the browser, I changed my mind thanks to the interface and its stability.

Quick and intuitive layout via app

I selected the type of photo-book preferring a rectangular page size oriented vertically, portrait to be clear, in order to make the most of many of my photos taken in that way. In truth I was also curious about the square page, maybe in the future I will order one like this. 40 pages of glossy photographic paper (ouch the fingerprints, but never mind) with non-padded hardcover.

The layout can be decided automatically by the software or manually. I preferred the first option and then modify it to my liking. I must say that the automatically chosen layouts are not bad, I thought worse. However, the sorting of photos based on the shooting date (or rather, based on the date the file was created) did not completely convince me, forcing me to manually edit 3/4 of the pages. Nothing serious, indeed.

Note on the full-page print that despite the internal stitching allows you to appreciate a photo in XL format. All very fast and clear. The ready-made layouts are very, very nice and can be integrated with longer or shorter texts.

There is no 100% freedom of layout (buy Adobe InDesign!) But it will be difficult not to find what we like. Maybe a few more fonts would have been better but, to be precise, it's nitpicking. The order is issued directly from the app and once it arrived, the photo book was exactly as I imagined. Great Saal Digital!

Inner pages in fairly thick glossy photo paper, they can hardly be crumpled or damaged. "Modern" hard cover and not a dust-catcher book. Very well done and pleasant to browse, too bad you only ordered 40 pages! I would have gladly printed twice as much.