Wedding photo albums

Do you create your own albums in Photoshop or do you use a printers software to design and layout the book, for example, My publisher.

Curious as to how most of you provide this service. In addition, how do you handle cover options, paper type, etc. Do you have cut it to a few options, for example a standard or a premium book?

InDesign. Limited page finish and cover material options. Limit page options to 40, 60 or 80.

PhotoJunction - bit of a learning curve, but it's free and has setups for many album manufacturers. It's made by Queensberry and I use Queensberry albums, so it's an obvious choice for me, but I've designed albums for other manufacturers with it. It's made just for designing albums, so may be easier than general design tools - no idea, I've never used InDesign or similar.

There's also Fundy Album Designer, never used it but it's another option. I think it runs in Photoshop.

That sounds like a good way to narrow down the choices.

I just use Bay photo lab's professional software. You can use your own templates and/or theirs. The econo is cool, but you cant render a copy to a client. So if you do use them, go with the PRO (the red icon)

Fundy Album designer for us

Is it standard practice to let the clients proof the album or is the first time they see it when you give them the hard-copy?

I give them one proof look for adjustments for free. After that I do a design fee. I think its the right thing to do. It is their life event

I design, they proof (from PDF and online versions). No limit on changes. No limit on number of rounds of changes. No limit on how long they take to get back to me.

mike_311 wrote in post #17776164
Is it standard practice to let the clients proof the album or is the first time they see it when you give them the hard-copy?

There is no standard practice. What would you want if it was your wedding? I wouldn't book a photographer that said "I design your album, you get no options".

I predesign and give the customer three sets of changes no charge. I find that most people make one decent sized set of changes then a couple of tweaks. It's far far easier than asking people what images they want in the album.

what kind of changes do you normally expect? a different style? swap out pictures? reorganize the layout?

Image swaps, sometimes changing page designs. I overdesign so people often make images smaller and put more on a page. Pretty trivial stuff to do using an album design program like PhotoJunction.

The pictures they choose in the first place, so no change there. If they have any particular request for layout say I want uncle bob on the same page as this pic if possible is where they have some input. The overall design Ill take their thoughts and work with it. And lastly to approve any additional pages (which is charged as extra) Here they can make a cut or two if need be.

Millers Labs has a pretty good software program to design their albums. We've been using them for the last couple of years and clients have been very happy. They have a simple one click option to produce a PDF sample after you design it.

How I produce my albums is to make up each page in Fotofusion or Album Design 6 or Photoshop, to the size required. Save as a jpeg file and import into the software of the album printers you are using as a page or double page spread. This way you are not restricted to the layout supplied by the album printer.

This way you can use any software programme to make up a page/double page spread. Apart from the first and back page all my pages are double page spreads which gives you a lot more scope in your designs.

Over time I have built up a large selection of templates to use in whatever album printers I use.

I have produced well over 50 albums using this method. Link below is an example of one of my albums produced in this way.

http://www.albelli.co.​uk …91-4127-afcf-5e28986214cf