Adding Panoramic Photos with Page Background and Text to a Two Page Spread

Many digital cameras have a mode for landscape or panoramic photos, however Shutterfly unfortunately doesn't have a layout that works well for these very wide and short photos (please work on this Shutterfly!). The only possibility is to use a layout for a full screen photo, but this creates complications if you're using a page background style (texture), or want text to go with your photo. I wanted to include two panoramic photos on a two-page spread, with captions and a page background that matches the rest of the album. After a lot of emails to Shutterfly and trial-and-error, I came up with the following work-around to achieve this effect.

If you don't need a page background or descriptive text on your two-page spread, there's a simpler guide here: http://blog.shutterfly.com/2666/how-to-create-a-2-page-spread

Step by Step

1. Since pages in Shutterfly photobooks are square, I decided I wanted each page to be filled with an approximately 3000 x 3000 image (enough pixels to print out nicely). In PhotoShop, I created a new image that was 6200 x 3100 pixels (the extra pixels around the edges are a buffer that will be cropped out in the page design). I added three layers to the image: a bottom layer for the page background/texture, another layer for the photo, and another layer for the text.
   
   Note: if you're designing a page image for the front or back cover, you should create an image that is slightly narrower than wide (because of the binding). You can use trial and error, but I used an image for the back cover with an aspect ratio of 0.94 which worked well.
   
   
2. To create the page background, you first need to get a background image (or tile) that you can use to fill it. In Shutterfly, go to the 'Style' panel on the Style tab of your photobook design, right-click on the background image you're using, then select 'View Image' or 'Save Image As...' from the pop-up menu to open/save the image background 'tile'. This will give you a tiny JPG that you can use to fill up the background of your page image. Most photo editing programs have a 'texture' or 'patterned' option for the Fill tool, and most of them also allow you to select a image from your hard drive to use as the texture/pattern. I first used the crop tool to make the tile JPG I got from Shutterfly square, and I also applied a soften filter so the edges would be less noticable (although that may not have been necessary). The results looked good - the page background on my 'fake' pages look virtually identical to the other pages in the final photobook.
   
   
3. I then opened the panoramic jpg photos from my digital camera, resized them so the width was a bit less than 6000 pixels (to leave some space around the edges), then copied and pasted them onto my page image.
   
   
4. To make the font for the text appear similar to the other pages in my photobook, I did a Google search for a downloadable copy of the True Type font I was using on Shutterfly. I don't know if all of the fonts used by Shutterfly have free versions available for download, but I found the one I was using ('Andy'). See for example www.dafont.com, www.font-zone.com, and www.fontyukle.com. I then used the text tool in Photoshop to create the text, eyeballing the size to make it look similar to the other pages in my photobook.
   
   
5. After saving the page image as JPG (using a high quality compression setting so the text wouldn't look fuzzy) and uploading it to Shutterly, I applied the 'full page photo' layout to two facing pages, and added the same page image to each one. By moving the crop area in the 'Edit Picture' window, I made each page show one side of the photo.
   
   
6. By default, Shutterfly will apply automatic color corrections (e.g., brightness and contrast) to an image in a photobook. For a page image that you've designed yourself, you'll probably want to turn this option off, otherwise the colors on the page background will look funny. In your photobook design, double-click the image to get to the 'Edit Photo' window, then on the Effects tab check the box that says 'Don't apply automatic corrections to this image'.
   
   
7. You can use a similar technique if you want to include an image that should have an irregular and/or transparent background. Below is another page from my photobook, where an image of Ireland have placed on the backcover with a background. (If Shutterfly would add support for image formats like PNG that allow transparent backgrounds, this would all be a lot easier!)