I recently spotted an ad from Saal Digital on Instagram offering £100 vouchers to selected Instagrammers, so I applied and then fairly rapidly received a voucher. I think this promotional deal is no longer available, but they do offer various vouchers for money off on their website (e.g. £30 discount available right now).
It seemed a golden opportunity to collect together photos from my first year of drone flying - not something I’d even considered until this voucher deal came along. There are quite a few options available, but I ordered a 30cm x 21cm “Professional Line” photobook with a clear acrylic cover. There are plenty of other options, including thicker paper, and different covers etc. The ones that come in gift boxes look especially gorgeous. Saal provide software to design the book - initially I just dragged and dropped a load of photos in and it did a pretty good job of coming up with layouts, which I could then spend some time tweaking. I found it easy to use but also flexible. It’s also entirely possible to design a book separately and just send them the PDF.
From order to delivery took 6 calendar days. And the result is really, really good - much better than other photobooks I’ve seen in the past.
The acrylic cover is great, but what you won’t get from these photos is the feel of the paper, which is more like a glossy postcard than normal paper - it really does feel top quality. The binding is also a lie-flat design, so photos across a double-page spread don’t have a deep crease down the middle. It works really well for big wide panoramas, as you can hopefully see below.
Their normal prices are not cheap, but I would definitely look to use them again if the opportunity came up.
