My experience with Blurb has been awful.

For background, my wife and I are serious amateur photographers. We've gone on National Geographic photo expeditions and learned in the field from some of Nat Geo's best photographers. We carry top of the line Nikon full frame DSLRs with professional grade lenses. We shoot raw images and when we do a book we process them into jpegs using LIghtroom and Photoshop. I say all this to establish that we know what we are doing.

After a recent trip to Africa, we tried Blurb as a tool to assemble a forty-four page book. The book they printed was awful. Pictures were not sharp, colors were off, especially green. We reported this to Blurb. They asked me to photograph the book and send them images. I pointed out that this was silly: matching for white balance would be difficult and photographing full pages (as they requested) would make it hard to see details. In the end, I sent them four images and Blurb agreed they had not delivered an acceptable book. They offered to print a new copy for free.

The second printed book was every bit as bad. Sharper, yes, but pages were incorrectly aligned: tops of photographs cut off and a white strip on the bottom because things were out of alignment. And the colors were still awful. I asked Blurb for a refund and they asked for photos again. I sent them four. I sent in the photos and got a message that, yes, once again the book was unacceptable and it would be forwarded to appropriate people for consideration of a refund. I waited ten days and was told that Blurb never gives refunds and that the problems were with my images. I was offered a coupon to pay for my next Blurb book project.

In the interim I redid the entire book using the Adoramapix cloud program, submitted it. And they returned a beautifully printed book using the same image files that Blurb has been unable to print well.

My advice to anyone who cares about image quality is to avoid Blurb and use Adoramapix. Blurb's print quality is abysmal and their customer support just wastes one's time. I see enough awful photos posted on Facebook and Instagram to know there must a market of people whom Blurb can satisfy, but for those of us who take pride in creating high quality images Adorama is the way to go.