YOUR OWN CALENDAR AT LULU - PART 2If you haven't read the first part of this article, scroll down to the December 3 post.
The test calendar I put together and ordered last Saturday arrived in the mail today.
In a word, the calendar looks really good! I also think a 7 day turn around time is pretty good.
In comparison to high quality calendars, like those produced by Browntrout, and lesser quality color calendars, I would say the Lulu calendar isn't quite as good as the Browntrout calendars, but much better than some of the lesser quality calendars.
I suspect the people who complain about the quality of Lulu's calendars probably aren't sending good quality files.
It is important that you send them a quality jpeg file. Your monitor needs to have reasonably accurate color. If not, red on your monitor might end up being orange or purple on a print from some commercial printer. If the color on your monitor is off, faces in print could come back looking pretty strange. The colors on the Lulu calendar are close to what I see on my monitor.
I sent three file types to Lulu. The sRGB files looked best in the calendar. When I do "real" calendars in the future (as opposed to my test calendar), I will know what to do to give them the best file.
I will work in Adobe RGB as I always do. I will save my optimized photo in layers as a PSD file, just as I would for making a print at home. Then I will flatten the layers and convert the file from Adobe RGB to sRGB. I will resize the photo to 11.25 x 8.75 inches at 300 ppi, sharpen to taste, and save the file as a jpeg file (quality level of 10) with a different name. This is the version I will send to Lulu.
Now that I have a calendar in mind hands, I can highly recommend Lulu as a good way to make your own calendars.
