2016 Calendar

sarasphotos

This year I've continued my tradition of making a calendar for my family and friends. It's not for sale and I only have a few printed - but I thought I'd share the images here. (Richard, if this belongs in another forum feel free to move it.)

This year's theme is "the beauty lies in the details". (Because I live in Germany the calendarium is in German.) I created the layout in InDesign and for the initial choosing and placement of the pictures I exported jpegs from Lightroom. After I had made the final size/layout/picture choice I edited the original DNG files in Photoshop and created CMYK tiffs for the final placement. (The printer got a CMYK PDF file.)

I find the conversion to CMYK the most challenging - I had to retweak every picture to get the colors back up to par. Indeed, I had one picture chosen for August that I had to toss because I just couldn't get the colors balanced to my satisfaction in CMYK. Since I only do this once a year it could naturally be my lack of CMYK expertise that caused the problems...

The other time suck was the calendarium. I used an InDesign plugin which was basically great, but it had so many layers it was a challenge to figure out which style was on which layer in order to format all of the lines and backgrounds. I would have loved to do a bit more fiddling but I just ran out of time!

So, here they are - enjoy. And naturally comments or constructive criticism are welcome. (And if you find a typo I don't think I want to know!! )



























I made this a bit larger so the description text is ledgible.



The calendars arrived today and I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out. The CMYK struggles paid off.

Cheers,

Sara

Thelensspot

Sara, this is beautiful. Anyone would be proud to have this from you! The pictures are just outstanding!

Great work!

Wayne

denisegoldberg

I agree, this is beautiful! My favorite months are May and June, wonderful photos!

--- Denise

Cavalier

- Lucky recipients!

Cornflake

Terrific! And what a great gift idea.

Eldon Shea

Well done!

Stumblebum

I agree with all the sentiment above! Bravo!!clap

torags

Really cool

Very well done

Happy Holidays to you and all on Dgrin...

sarasphotos

Thank you all for your generous compliments! The hours invested were well worth it.

I wish you all and all the dgrinners a joyous and stress-free holiday season.

Cheers, Sara

jerryr

Great job Sara - my favorite months are October and December (love the details of December!).

- jerryr

CCoop

Blown away by the images ... and your ability to see the project through to printing. An awesome production!! And my favs: March, September and December for me. --Carter

sarasphotos

Thank you jerryr, thank you Carter for your kind comments. I think it is great that different people have different favorites - shows how different eyes / personal taste works!

@Carter - there are indeed many simpler routes to calendar printing than using InDesign and converting to CMYK. Most online photo printing places offer a "pop your photos into their layout" method and some of the pre-made designs are actually quite nice. But basically I'm a cheapskate - for the amount of calendars that I printed (around 20), my online printing place cost me less than half as much as much as the "easy-peasy" places. All of those easy places offer virtually no bulk discount.

Lucklily, in the 80s and 90s I did quite a bit of work in graphic layout / desktop publishing and although my skills are somewhat rusty I can still get around in InDesign. And it's always good to have a project that keeps me in practice.

Cheers,

Sara

Richard

Good job, Sara. Great pics and professional looking layout. I know from personal experience how much work this must have been but it looks like it was worth it.

sarasphotos

Thanks, Richard!