There can be a variety of reasons that you’d want to invest in a photo book. Perhaps you have a friend’s birthday coming up and you want to produce an album filled with the experiences you’ve had together? Or, perhaps you’re sick of only seeing your images on a computer screen and you’re ready to print them out for display?
No matter why you want to make a photo book, selecting the right company can be difficult with so many printing providers to choose from that make the best photo books. We put a range of companies to the test, including CEWE Photoworld, a British photo printing company that offers a wide variety of products, including photo books, photo calendars and even photo puzzles.
Specifications
Book shape: Landscape, Portrait, Square, A6
Book size: 14 x 13cm, 19 x 15cm, 21 x 21cm, 28 x 21cm, 21 x 28cm, 30 x 30cm, 28 x 36cm, 38 x 29cm
Paper: Classic, High-Gloss, True Matte, Classic Photographic, Gloss Photographic, Matte Photographic
Style: Hardcover, Softcover, Booklet, Faux Leather
Extra pages: £1.70 per four pages
Shipping: UK only
Ease of use
We’re not really a fan of having to download an app to be able to order from a photo finishing platform. However, despite being required to do this in order to be able to design our photo book, we did find the software quick and easy to download. It was also simple to navigate for our photo book creation process as well.
Using the photo book creator tool, you can add and edit text easily, choosing from a wide range of fonts and sizes to personalize your book. The CEWE Photoworld book assistant (CEWE’s tool for automatically arranging your images) is also one of the cleverer ones we’ve tested, allowing you to customize what number of photos are spread across what number of pages.
Quality of results
Out of the six photo books that we’ve reviewed so far, the CEWE Photoworld book was definitely one of our favorites. One of the first things we noticed when we took it out of the fairly minimal packaging was how crisp the image on the front cover was. When compared with front covers on the other photo books we’ve reviewed, CEWE Photoworld’s offering had much more detail. In addition, while the color accuracy wasn’t quite perfect, it was much better than the majority of the other books.
Inside the book we found that the paper stock was really good quality and the images were printed sharply and fairly accurately. It’s worth noting that the sharpness of the printing does mean that noise is much more likely to show up than in other books. We also found that the prints in general ran a little darker than the other photo books we reviewed.
Conclusion
All in all, we were very pleased with our results from CEWE Photoworld. Our Square photo book was the cheapest out of all the books we ordered (although it was also the smallest as well), but the results speak for themselves. It’s definitely worth noting that the printing for both the cover and the book pages ran dark and a little over-saturated, so it may be worth giving your photos a slight boost in brightness in an editing program before uploading them to the app.
However, the sharpness of the prints and the quality of the book itself were both very impressive. If we were to order from any photo book manufacturer again, we’d have to go with CEWE Photoworld.
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