Issue using Aperture to design photo book

mercphoto

I'm pretty happy with using Aperture to design relatively simple photo books. Its great to stay in one tool. But I'm not happy with how it exports JPGs from the book I designed. Don't think its a problem with my automator workflow file either.

I'm using Aperture 2 to design a photo book with a custom theme in a 10x10" size. Black River Imaging will publish the book, not Apple. So I need to get my pages out as JPGs. I'm using the Print PDF to Folder JPG's automator flow that I have edited to spit out 300 dpi files in the sRGB space at highest quality. But I'm not happy with the JPG quality its spitting out.

I did an experiment where I exported the individual JPG images for a book page and brought them into Photoshop. Resized the images based on where they went into the page layout and re-implemented the page layout in Photoshop, saving as JPG-12 optimized. Results?

Aperture - 733 KB for a 10x10 300 dpi page
Photosho - 2.1MB, and yes, viewed at 100% obvious differences to detail.

Its a bummer. Making the photo books within Aperture is much, much easier. But I'm not happy with the "print PDF to JPG pages" flow.

Any ideas?