Out of inDesign, the printed material looks too dark. I get the dot gain thing, but I need to know how much to increase brightness of an image so they look proper.

I am adjusting the same image multiple times and sending that image to the printer to see how each one looks. The adjustment I’m making is Shadows/Highlights as I don’t exactly want to adjust brightness. I want the highlights to stay where they are. Curves also didn’t quite work as I intended.

“Amount” is the only parameter I’ll be adjusting: 5,10,15,20,25,30% and print them to see what the effect is in print.

For creating books with images that go off the page, export the file from inDersign as (from the “File > Adobe PDF Presets” menu) PDF/X-1a:2001. In the “Marks and Bleeds” menu of the PDF Export, check off the “Use Document Bleed Settings” check box.

In the createspace environment select “Bleed ends after the edge of page”

Looking into finding cheaper services to print my Kinetik Festival photo books I came across CreateSpace.
I think at this point of my self publishing career, this service dots all the is and crosses all the t’s for me. There are some issues with ownership of the ISBN numbers they assign, (read here), but for the most part it looks very promising.
With book printing prices as low as I’ve yet seen, an enormous distribution network (as it’s part of Amazon), and (from what I’ve read) decent quality printing, I don’t know why I would NOT go with them at least for the next photo book. I can always decide to move to a different service with future books.
I am even considering re-doing the K4 photo book into a new edition so I can print it with CreateSpace as the Blurb.com software I used limits you to using only their service to print the books.

Everything is printed on demand, shipped to the customer, and I get the royalties. Easy.

Talk about inDesign templates (here)