The production of a photo book is a long and complex process that requires different tools for each part of the process, from taking the photographs to the final layout. This section provides a list of open-source software to facilitate your work.
IMAGE EDITING
BeFunky is all-in-one online creative platform. It has different resources to easily edit photos, create graphic designs, and make photo collages. It’s mainly devoted to creating images for social media, online advertisements, events, and cards. Nevertheless, you can profit from it and use this tool to edit specific pages of your photo book, such as the cover.
Photopea is an online image editor created in 2013 by independent developer Ivan Kuckir. It is a tool similar to Photoshop but online, so you don’t have to install any software. Features include layers and masks blending modes to combine layers, selections, and adjustments such as hue, saturation or blur, among others. Photopea supports .psd, .xd, .sketch, .xcf, RAW and compressed formats such as JPG, PNG and others.
GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes. It’s a software pretty similar to the well known Adobe Photoshop.
FLIPBOOK SOFTWARE
Flipbook software gives the illusion of flipping the pages of a book. Generally, it takes a PDF document and converts it into Flash or HTML5, creating a dynamic experience that is interactive for viewers. When speaking about digital photo books, this tool helps us recreate realistic page flips, mimicking the physical activity of turning pages.
Heyzine is an online tool that converts PDF to PDF to flipbook, without ads or watermarks. It is highly customizable with different page flip effects. You can link, share or embed it at no cost. Note that you must log in or register to keep it online for free.
See some examples: https://heyzine.com/#examples
Simplebooklet PDF Flipbook. As it happens with Heyzine, this is an online platform that allows you to create flipbooks from a PDF. It’s necessary to log in and create an account. This platform allows you to do a single project without cost.
VIDEO EDITING
Some artists complete their photo books with a video piece where they simply show the result quickly or where they expand the initial proposal, mixing their photographs with sounds, music, interviews, signs or moving images.
OpenShot Video Editor is a free and open-source video editor for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS. The project started in August 2008 by Jonathan Thomas, with the objective of providing a stable, free, and friendly to use video editor. OpenShot supports commonly used video compression formats that are supported by FFmpeg, including WebM (VP9), AVCHD (libx264), HEVC (libx265), and audio codecs such as mp3. The program can render MPEG4, ogv, Blu-ray, and DVD video, and Full HD videos for uploading to Internet video web sites.
Shotcut is another popular open source video editor available for Linux, macOS and Windows. The interface is friendly and nice to work on. It supports almost all major audio/video formats. Besides editing, it offers a wide range of features, from color correction to adding transitions
Image Theory 