Aperture photo book vs iPhoto quality

Aperture has much more versatile layout options -

Though the print quality in iPhoto and Aperture is simply NOT up to a professional standard.

Aperture and iPhoto both print at 300dpi. iPhoto 6 prints at 300dpi. If you have a previous version, ie, 5, then it will print at 150dpi. Aperture gives you more advanced layout options, but doesn't include a medium book size.

I don't know which service is better. The booklayout can be exported to PDF (at least in Aperture) which can then be taken to a print shop, if you want guaranteed professional results.

Recently I uploaded and had printed a hardbound book that had been designed within Aperture. Prior to this, I have used iPhoto to produce 10 such books starting back in 2002. I have always chosen the picture book format because it provided the largest images.

This time I used Aperture because it allows large images with small captions and a good deal or freedom of length and placement.I particularly appreciated the good snap placement between the pictures and other captions. The ease of producing 2 page spreads was impressive. The book ran 84 pages and the quality of the resulting was very good–on a par with my other Apple photo books.

On only one occasion have I had a problem with quality control of these books. In that case an a good high resolution image was pixelated. In that case, I was able to call Apple and speak to someone, who after hearing my description, asked me to send my copy back and issued a reprint order.

My only bit of consternation with this order is that I found no such contact information enclosed with the book.

Finally, I haven't seen any specific suggestions within this formum for third-party print houses that can produce good quality books. Just assertions that alternatives do exist. I would be willing to strip down the .pdf file of the book I have just created to some of the trickier images and see how these one of these print houses fare.

Here to an Aperture New Year!
Don O'Shea