Cover, endpapers and materials

Every cover is shown open, the way it is made: back, spine and front, with the lab’s material underneath.

1. Cover and endpapers come first in the timeline and do not count as spreads.
2. Back · Spine · Front: labels on the sheet and blue guides for the spine, the hinges and the edges of the boards. The material shows underneath at its real scale and is never printed.
3. The plate (a zone on the front, against the edge that opens) with its cut line: the solid red line is the edge of the file, so the photo goes up to it; the dashed red line is where the lab cuts (e.g. 0.5 cm in), so faces, hands and letters stay inside it.
4. Cover settings on the right: material, size and zones.

On the cover and the endpapers the toolbar shows only what fits there: placeholders for the Back, the Front, the Whole cover and the Plate, and text. Auto-Build, automatic layout and spread templates are hidden.

Cover settings

• Material: from the lab’s materials library; it dresses the back and spine (with a plate) or the whole cover. Search by name or code when there are hundreds.
• Guides 🔒: the cover guides (spine, hinges, edges) are locked, with faded fields and no ＋/×, so they do not move by mistake. Click the lock → 🔓 and they can change. The “turn-in” is the margin that folds round the board.
• Board width and height, spine width, hinge: the board takes the height seen from the plate (e.g. 20.5 cm on a 20×20, 30.5 on a 30×30); spine and hinge come from the lab size or the cover type. Guides, zones and the design move with them.
• ＋ Zone: anything the lab prints separately (names on the spine, a logo on the back, foil). Each zone is exported as its own file. Text goes anywhere with T.

How the cover is made

• From the lab’s PSD template: choose the templates folder once. The app reads the template by itself: a plate template (metal, glass, wood) becomes the plate on the front of the open cover; a template for fabric, leatherette or velvet without guides becomes a “Logo or names” zone in the middle of the front (a transparent PNG); a whole printed cover (photo wrap) stays as it is. The template’s texts stay editable.
• By dimensions, for labs without a template.
• Save cover as… keeps a cover type (e.g. “Metal panel 30×30”): next time you choose it in the New album window and the cover is ready.

Exporting the cover

In Export › For print, the cover comes out as “Only the plate (and the zones)” (the default: Cover.jpg at the plate’s size, e.g. 26.3 × 31.5 cm, and one file per zone) or “The whole cover (back · spine · front)” (one Cover.jpg of the whole sheet). The client sees the closed book in 3D, with the plate on the material.

Materials