We just received our 2021 photo albums and I am blown away with out beautiful they are. This was our first time ordering from Artifact Uprising for full-sized photo albums, and I was nervous spending this much money worried it may not be as good as our Blurb books. For years I've only printed on Blurb after not being so happy with the quality of the images in Shutterfly and Snapfish (especially with our travel photos, but in comparison to blurb the other companies had more "dotted" printing and it wasn't as crystal clear, and the pages were thinner). I searched the internet far and wide for comparisons between Blurb and Artifact Uprising and couldn't find much out there, so this prompted the idea for this post.
The Everyday Photo Books
From Artifact Uprising we ordered two "Everyday Photo Books." These albums are 7x7" and are printed on thick pages that lay totally flat. The cover is a beautiful linen and it allows you to personalize the title and end with foil stamp letters. We printed one book full of snapshots from Lily's first birthday, and we printed the other using our professional photos from our fall session.
The uploading and album creation process was the simplest I've used. When the albums arrived I was mesmerized at how gorgeous the linen covers were and how beautiful the images inside printed.
These albums print on matte paper and it's such a high quality textured paper that brings a lot of life to the photos. However, you must increase the exposure (and so sometimes it also then requires decreasing highlights and some other photo editing tricks) in order for the matte to not emphasize the dark parts of the image. Matte paper fibers absorb the ink and it can make images appear darker. They tell you to decrease screen brightness by 50% while editing, this worked so well for us.
The professional photos we turned into an album were breathtaking in this book, and did turn out better than my camera photos in Lily's birthday book. That being said, we are extremely happy with both books and they both turned out great.
The Hardcover Photo Books
This book is their "Hardcover Photo Book" . The one I made was almost 200 pages and is 10x10". This album includes almost all of our phone photos as well as photos from my camera over the past year. For this album you do get to choose what paper you like (lustre vs matte). I went with lustre because that's what I am used to from other photo albums. The paper is high quality, thick, and has a nice sheen to it keeping the colors bright. This book is not layflat like the smaller ones we ordered, but they do offer it in larger albums ($$$).
I chose the light tan linen cover, and put a half size dust jacket on it. I have no complaints about this book, it's everything I wanted and more. It's truly representative of the greatest year of my life, and it's one of my most treasured items.
It's hard to take a photo of a photobook, but here you can see some of the differences between the lustre paper and the matte printing from the "Everyday Photo Books."
Comparison to Blurb
The editing and upload process for Artifact Uprising was much easier and more time saving. I used to love spending time cropping and arranging all of my Blurb pages, but now I just don't have that time any more. On Blurb you also have to download an app to edit your books. Artifact Uprising layouts are very standard and allow for less creativity, but their "vibe" is very classic and aesthetically pleasing so it's hard to mess up.
I'm not a professional, but to me the pages from Artifact Uprising in "Lustre" and the Blurb "Premium paper lustre finish" felt the same paper-wise and the images printed the same quality. The matte images in the two smaller books obviously printed differently, however they were unique and beautiful in their own ways. Both of them print significantly better than cheaper printing photobook brands.
The covers from Artifact Uprising are better, but the prices are steeper.
As you can see, the Blurb albums (white boks) even printed the black and white photo with some blue tones to it. It had zero saturation with my editing, so that's not ideal to have that in the print. The Artifact Uprising printed a true black and white.
Overall I love both of the companies and recommend ordering from both (only when they have 25-35% off because it happens fairly frequently!!). I like the style of Artifact Uprising better and how it takes less time to make the books, so I will choose this company again. I like the idea of keeping special memories in the small layflat albums and making a yearly large linen album for our home.
Jake and I are thrilled with these Artifact Uprising books, we will treasure them forever.
Comments