▶ VIDEO — youtube-nocookie.com/embed/3B8EE-_4CVk
▶ VIDEO — youtu.be/3B8EE-_4CVk
How to Make a Photo Zine at Home with Flux Studio
I hate the term. I think it’s a stupid term, street photography.
What’s poppin’, people? It’s Dante. Today I’m going to share my personal photography website and a tool I built to help you create your own photo zine at home. And so without further ado, let’s jump straight to the desktop.
A Decade of Photography
Here we have my website at dantesisofo.com. On the homepage, you’ll find my photographs, my most recent writing, and some educational material under the Learn tab. There’s also Flux Studio, where you can start to make zines at home, and the Community tab, where you can see zines people submitted using the Flux system.
The most recent work here is from Lars Gralo from northern Germany, which is absolutely stunning. I’m always excited to go through the work people submit to me.
Under Photographs, you can see a full timeline of a decade of photography, from 2016 to 2026. You can browse the color work or the Flux black-and-white work and navigate by year and month. When you click a photograph, it opens in a lightbox. You can open the original JPEG or even download the original RAW file for my color work. Click Information to see the camera settings I used.
Under Blog, you’ll find my most recent videos and posts, along with guides and street photography resources. You can browse by year and month or use the search bar. Under Learn, you’ll find my street photography masterclass, free e-books you can download to your phone, and my masterclass on layering, which I highly recommend. At the bottom there’s a full index of my original blog posts. Everything you see there is free to explore.
You can also click the little icon in the bottom right to switch to dark mode. And on the Start Here page, you can find my Substack, Discord, and YouTube.
Making a Zine in Flux Studio
Let’s get straight to Flux Studio. If you click Flux, it’ll take you to flux.photography. There you’ll find the Studio, the generators that automatically create zines, the community gallery, the protocol page, and a contact sheet studio. There’s also a workshop coming soon.
When you open Flux Studio, you can choose US Letter or A4 paper. There are a couple of different formats, including landscape, magazine, saddle stitch, and mini. For today’s video, I’m going with US Letter and saddle stitch.
The first thing you want to do is add your photographs on the left-hand side. Drag them in or click Add Photographs, and the zine will automatically fill the spreads.
On the cover, you can add your title and name, choose a font and title size, and add a subtitle, date, or issue number. There are a couple of cover templates, and you can decide whether you want captions or page numbers and where those will go. You can even add your website and have a QR code automatically generated for the back of the zine, where there’s also an automatic contact sheet.
Sequencing the Photographs
As you go through the spreads, you can drag and drop photographs and rearrange them however you like. Click a photograph to fill the frame, zoom in, crop, reposition it, or rotate it. You can also display the whole photograph.
There are a bunch of different layouts to play with. You can stack two photos, put them on a diagonal, run a single image across the full spread, or make diptychs and triptychs. You can also drag the spread thumbnails to rearrange the sequence.
Printing the Zine and Saving the Project
When you’re ready, click Generate PDF in the top right. It’ll compress the file and give you a PDF you can download and review. To print it at home, press Command-P, select double-sided printing, and make sure you flip on the short edge.
You can also upload the PDF to your own website for people to download, or submit it to me and I’ll add it to the Flux community zines.
One of the fun things about the Studio is that you can export a .fluxstudio project file. In the video, I delete the test project and then load the backup from my Downloads folder to reopen the work I was just creating. If you want to revisit a project, export it from the Studio and keep that file. You can load the backup on the same computer you were working on. Nothing is stored on the website itself.
Making a Zine in 30 Seconds
Next, I want to share the Flux Generator. Add a title and your name, choose landscape, magazine, saddle stitch, or mini, and pick your paper size and whether you want 24 or 36 photos. Then drag and drop your photographs, and the generator will make a PDF.
In just 30 seconds, you can create a zine.
The work is automatically sequenced, timestamped, and captioned. That’s the fastest way to produce a zine. If you want to sequence the photographs yourself and customize the spreads, that’s what Flux Studio is for.
Printing Contact Sheets
Back on Flux Photography, you’ll find the contact sheet tool. Drag in your photographs, choose 6, 12, or 36 photos, and generate a PDF.
Each thumbnail has three options you can mark by hand: pick, maybe, or out. You can print the sheet at home and use those little thumbnails to work out your sequence physically. It’s a fun way to get the photographs in front of you while you’re putting the zine together.
Make Your Own Zine at Home
I highly encourage you to produce your own zines at home. In the video, I show the Flux saddle stitch, the 8.5-by-11 magazine, the portrait and landscape options, and the Flux Mini, which you can print on a single 8.5-by-11 sheet.
Check out my website and the Flux zine tools, subscribe to my Substack for more, and join the Flux Discord. You can reach me there and meet people who are sharing photographs and zines every day.
Thank you for watching today’s video. I’ll see you in the next one. Peace.
DANTE SISOFO · · dantesisofo.com/how-to-make-a-photo-zine-at-home-with-flux-studio/
