How to Adjust the Holiday Faves 6×8 Mini Album Templates for Bleed & Trim
One thing to keep in mind when printing your pages, especially when you’re printing a photo book, is you may need to account for bleed and trim.
What do I mean by bleed and trim? Well, in order to avoid unwanted white edges during the printing process, most printers will expand your image anywhere from a 1/8 to a 1/4 of an inch and then trim off the excess to ensure your image bleeds edge-to-edge. AdoramaPix has a video that shows exactly how this works.
To avoid anything important getting cut off, most printing services have a recommended “safe zone”, usually around 1/4 inch from the edge, in which they recommend not placing anything important, like text or someone’s face.
In most cases this is enough but in some cases you may want to adjust the actual size and design of your page (or template in this case) to account for this bleed, based off your printers bleed & trim recommendations.
AdoramaPix recommends a 1/8-inch (.125) trim and 1/4-inch (.25) safe zone so for this example, that’s what I’m going to use.
Note: This tutorial was written for the 6×8-inch templates but the steps are the same for 8×8 – you’re numbers for the height and width will just be the same.
The first step is to open the 6×8-inch template and draw out guidelines at the 1/8 and 1/4 inch mark so we know whether we need to adjust the template or not.
In this Trees template, we can see that while the majority of our design is in the safe zone, there’s a good chance we will lose half of the border, if 1/8 of an inch is trimmed off.
So how do we fix that? Well it’s pretty easy.
How to Adjust for Bleed & Trim in Photoshop
Step 1: Increase the Canvas Size to account for the bleed.
In the Photoshop Menu, go to Image>Canvas Size
Step 2: In the Canvas Size box, increase the size of the canvas to your current size (6×8 inches) by the amount of bleed times two.
In this case that equals 6+.125+.125=6.25 which will give us 1/8-inch bleed on all sides of the page. If you wanted to add a full quarter inch trim, you would increase your page size to 6.5 inches so there’s .25 on each side.
Now you should have an expanded canvas the size of your new dimensions:
Step 3: Transform (Cmd/Ctrl+T) the background layer to fill the new canvas.
Step 4: Transform any additional elements you want to adjust for the new canvas size. In this example, I increased the size of the Paper 1 layer and Tree Trunks down an 1/8 inch to fill the gap at the bottom of the page.
And you’re all done! Now when I draw out 1/8 inch trim guides around the edge of the page, the full border remains.
And if I draw out the 1/4 inch safe zone again, everything is well within those boundaries:
Keep in mind that now when you go to print your pages you’ve adjusted for bleed/trim, you’ll want to save/print them at the NEW size 6.25×8.25 in this example, NOT the old 6×8 inch size.
Adding Bleed/Trim when you print at home
A quick tip: If you print at home and find yourself having to trim slivers of white paper off your less-than-perfectly-trimmed pages (as I often do), you can follow the same tutorial above to additional bleed to your own pages and then simply trim them down to 6×8 inches after you print. You can even combine it with the crop marks tutorial so you know exactly where to trim.
