Why not design your albums in Photoshop or InDesign? A lot of people do, and they're great applications – we depend on them both ourselves. A few thoughts … Adobe don't think designing your albums in Photoshop is a good idea. That's not what it's for. Adobe's page layout software is InDesign. So how much does InDesign know about wedding and portrait photographers, their workflow, their albums and their suppliers? InDesign doesn't know what DPI your lab needs, or what file type, or what size the printed layouts should be, or about bleed and trim requirements, or what colour management processes To View More >>

Pre-wedding engagement shoots are fairly common these days - but Michelle and TJ Getz of Getzcreative go one step further and offer their clients post-wedding shoots too. These post-wedding "Creative Sessions" allow them to offer a distinctive and creative photography session without the pressures of the wedding day. For example, Michelle shot Lauren and Josh's wedding in October 2008 in South Carolina and the couple are working with Michelle to put together their Queensberry wedding album (they've nearly doubled their page count from 18 to 30 pages!). But Lauren and Josh also purchased this To View More >>

Steve Sharp sent us this exceptional album to complete our series of posts with him. Steve shot Ben and Lauren's wedding in Taupo, New Zealand, a few weeks ago and designed them a 14x10 Queensberry Digital Album.  The couple initially committed to a 12-page album package, but Steve presented them with a 24-page album, pre-designed in Photojunction. Steve finds that most of his clients, when presented with a larger range of page designs and images, decide to include more pages in their album than they have initially pre-committed to.  Ben and Lauren have not yet finalised their album, but any To View More >>

How do you deal with changes your clients want to make to their album design? It's a question that came up recently with a photographer who was considering changing his strategy. He was saying that there's a fine balance between creating a beautiful album design, and not letting the clients destroy it, and delivering something the couple feel connected too. So what are your options? Here are a few. None of them are right or wrong. Like your pricing, style, branding etc you've got to figure out what works best for you, and your clients. 1. Pre-design and allow a limited number of free edits: Once To View More >>

Let's wrap up this Problem reporter series and stop ignoring the elephant in the room… Who needs a problem reporter anyway? After all, as we confirmed at the webinar it drives some people nuts. Well I'm glad you asked! I should start by saying it's not an unusual concept. Try googling "pre-flight", for example, and check out the Wikipedia and Adobe listings in particular. What the pre-flight process does in the printing industry is ensure that digital files sent for printing are all present, valid, correctly formatted, and of the desired type. Why? Because, if they're not, the job can't be done. To View More >>