Our first layout from Graphistudio

[Banbert]

We just got our first layout back from Graphistudio today and personally i am very pleased with it ! This was the 1st wedding we shot this year and only our second ever wedding so we were happy to give the photos over to them to see what they could make of our newbie photos!!

I wanted to use it as some fresh content for our website so I have taken the PDF and made a little showit slideshow that can be viewed here>

http://boundlessphotos.co.uk/albums.html

Weve done 7 weddings now this year and I think we "see a lot more shots" now than when we shot this one but I am still very pleased with what Graphistudio have turned it into and cant wait to hear what our friends think who were our first clients of this year.

Anyway comments welcome but please bear in mind the couple picked the shots so theres more group shots in there than if we had just picked them for a studio sample, having said that we have actually ordered ourselves a duplicate book because I still think it will be a great selling tool to future clients, we like our group shots in the UK !

[Toogy]

Just curious, did you choose the photos for them to use? did you have a general guideline for them to follow? Or did you submit a bunch of photos and they choose which ones to use? I am looking at farming out my album designs and just curious how it all works.

[Banbert]

The B&G chose the photos from the 6 x 4 prints and online proofs we gave them, we added a few that they didnt choose what we thought would balance it and add some background opportunities. We gave graphistudio the photos numbered in chronological order that the day ran in and also a few notce on what the B&G's and our faves were, so just where we wanted a pic large and also a couple of their layouts we didnt want them to use..... they did the rest. Weve factored in some changes and the fee Graphistudio charge for this.

[howzitboy]

nice album! came out great. thats pretty kewl way to make album, let someone else do it!!

[Banbert]

Cheers matey, it obviously cuts into our profits doing it this way but theres just soo many good reasons for doing it this way, at least for this our first year anyway, so it was a very easy decision to make and this has been very much reinforced with the first layout they sent us back ..... I think they did a great job of telling the story of the day and making the most of our photos and theres no way we could have come up with layouts as good as those.

I know people argue that their book ends up looking just like every other graphi book but its the photos that make it personal to the couple not the way its wrapped up imo, maybe in years to come we will have our own style for albums but for the time being were happy to let them do it for us whilst we try and improve our photography.

Just for info, we sent the photos and order details to them this Monday via their courier, so they got it Tuesday, and we got our draft layout today .. thats a pretty good turnaround imo.

[mizuno]

It's a very basic design, which is obviously GS's aim.

I reckon I could have completed a design of that kind (with files and instructions) in around 3-4 hours. With that in mind, if you're paying less than $300-$400 for the design it looks like a decent deal/service.

[maytownme]

Yeah thats a really good layout.I have done many practice page designs myself from my own wedding proofs,any I think the simplistic layouts are better...."less is more"
kinda thing! Good job.

[tim]

Simple, effective. I like it. Doesn't matter if the GraphiStudio albums are all reasonably similar, the B&G has probably never seen one before.

[Banbert]

Posting this here for Jonny who pm'd me with some general questions about Graphi books but I cant reply matey cos your PM box is full !

Hiya matey

Happy to share our experience, although we havent recieved the 1st book yet, our clients have just approved it today with no revisions so were really looking forward to getting it now

We did very little to our images, we corrected WB in the raw files as we do for all images before converting them to jpg's and then a little cloning out of a few things that had sneaked into a couple of shots and that was it really.

Supplied them all at full sized jpg @ 300 DPI and left them to do their stuff.

We didnt do any sharpening as I thought that would be a bad idea as you should do that after resizing images (from what I understand anyway) and obviously you dont know what size each photo is gonna be in the album.

We gave them very little direction on the album design except telling them which was our clients fave image and the design they came up with was great and our clients thought so too !

To place our order we used the courier collect method with the images on a CD and the forms filled in and they got them on the system very quickly once UPS had delivered them back to them. Payment terms are that we give the driver a cheque that gets sent back to them when the album is delivered to us, which is fabulous.

Hope some of that helps matey, good luck with your order, I guess youve heard about their latest parents album changes.

Nick

[Fleurina]

Banbert,

What did you think about Graphi's customer service and turnaround time? I have heard not so great things from photographer friends, but haven't had any personal dealings with them yet.

Thanks, Laura

[Banbert]

Originally Posted by Fleurina

Banbert,

What did you think about Graphi's customer service and turnaround time? I have heard not so great things from photographer friends, but haven't had any personal dealings with them yet.

Thanks, Laura

Pretty good so far tbh, although as I said earlier we havent got our book yet, but no delays on their part yet, we were waiting for our client to approve the design for the last 10 days.

They received the paperwork and images from us and then 3 days later had the layout on line. Weve had to speak to them a few times but thats mainly us ironing out our own errors and adding extras. They introduced a new offer after when our order was in progress but they gave us the same rate for what we had already submitted so that was cool.

I like the online tracking of the orders, being able to see what stage our books are at and access to the pdfs and the way its organised will be handy for when we have more books on the go.

We approved our book today with them so we will see how long it takes from this point on.

Were using this one as a portfolio album as well so weve ordered our own duplicate book, parents book, mini albums and calendar so its quite expensive for us but I think it will present our work in a really nice manner and definitely get us some more business....... thats the idea anyway

[Fleurina]

Thanks for the reply

Forgot to say in my last post, I like the layout a lot. Very elegant and simple!

[culshaw]

Has anyone experienced errors when sending images to Graphistudio via their software?

I am using a mac and getting the error director player errorrecord count script error continue?

Does this mean anything to anyone?

Tried the update but no joy

[jonwhite]

Ohh this is an old thread, Nick (aka Banbert) cant reply anymore but I still have an account here and were still using Graphi.

We were very pleased with this first book and have continued to use them for our digital books using their design service (we also offer queensberry as a more traditional album now as well) and we have just started using the graphi supplied software to do our own layouts (Nicks Wife Kate does them) and although its a bit glitchy and nowehere near as refined as Fotofusion or Photojunction its a good place to start and hopefully they will continue to develop it.

Weve not uplaoded an album to them yet but have about 5 currently in progress so will hopefully be ready to do so soon, will let you know if we have issues also.

[janedoggettphotography]

Originally Posted by culshaw

Has anyone experienced errors when sending images to Graphistudio via their software?

I am using a mac and getting the error director player errorrecord count script error continue?

Does this mean anything to anyone?

Tried the update but no joy

I know this is an old thread but it came up in my search for a solution to the same error message and I couldn't find anything online. I have fixed this problem however so hope this post will help someone else, I don't know what the equivalent for a mac OS would be, sorry.

Ans:

I had the same problem on 2 pc's and turning off the UAC when installing the software seemed to resolve the issue on my Vista and Windows 7 installs. :O)