Problem with Aperture, book design, and JPGs

[mercphoto]

I'm pretty happy with using Aperture to design relatively simple photo books. Its great to stay in one tool. But I'm not happy with how it exports JPGs from the book I designed. Don't think its a problem with my automator workflow file either.

I'm using Aperture 2 to design a photo book with a custom theme in a 10x10" size. Black River Imaging will publish the book, not Apple. So I need to get my pages out as JPGs. I'm using the Print PDF to Folder JPG's automator flow that I have edited to spit out 300 dpi files in the sRGB space at highest quality. But I'm not happy with the JPG quality its spitting out.

I did an experiment where I exported the individual JPG images for a book page and brought them into Photoshop. Resized the images based on where they went into the page layout and re-implemented the page layout in Photoshop, saving as JPG-12 optimized. Results?

Aperture - 733 KB for a 10x10 300 dpi page
Photosho - 2.1MB, and yes, viewed at 100% obvious differences to detail.

Its a bummer. Making the photo books within Aperture is much, much easier. But I'm not happy with the "print PDF to JPG pages" flow.

Any ideas?

[TXhummer2]

Aperture 2: Controlling the DPI setting for book pages output to JPEG or TIFF

May help...

[mercphoto]

Done that already. Its that process which created my test files. :(

[soymilk]

Does it still happen when you export to jpeg straight from aperture? I just exported one now and its 3.7MB.

[mercphoto]

Exporting JPGs is fine. Its trying to get a book designed page out of Aperture as a JPG that I'm questioning. You can't export a book page, you have to print to PDF and have an automator script create JPG's from the PDF pages. And that is behaving a bit squirrely on me.

As an example my Automator script requests a 300 dpi image. Its a 10x10" master. I'm getting 72 dpi at 42.3", which still works out to 3,000 pixels. But I gotta wonder, if that part is acting squirrely can I be positive I'm getting the JPG compression level I'm asking for?

[Kraftsims]

I'd be curious as to why you aren't sending the book out to apple and using another company?

[mercphoto]

Because the Apple books aren't very good quality. Have you ever seen anything from the likes of Asuka, Pounds Photo or Black River Imaging?

[mercphoto]

Got another Automator question. The normal PDF to JPG Pages automator script you find on the web will spit out pages in some generic display color profile, which is both very odd and of course completely worthless. I need sRGB and so I added an Apply ColorSync profile step. But what I don't know is if that simply assigns a color profile or actually converts to the color profile? Obviously I need a conversion.

I'm also puzzled by the whole compression slider, which choices of "least" and "best". I'm wanting the least compression and the best quality so I'm really puzzled as to where I should put this slider.