Your first album is 25% off the normal album price, and every album after that is 40% off the normal album price. All additional spreads beyond the included 30 pages will also receive these same discounts!

Get moving, this incentive will only be valid through January 31!

Willow Album Design will be closed from December 23-January 2. This means we won’t be answering emails, uploading orders, or designing. If you’re not able to submit revisions about a week before that, don’t worry! I’ll be rested and ready to work up a storm starting in January again!

November 20 – Zookbinders
November 22 – Finao ONE
November 23 – Leather Craftsmen
December 4 – Vision Art
December 6 – Finao Elements

To future clients, throughout the months of October and November I will be extending my normal 5 business day turnaround to 8 business days. This doesn’t mean it will necessarily take that long, just that it is possible should I be jammed with current clients.

With many album companies having Christmas deadlines between November 15-December 1, I’m expecting quite the rush in the last few weeks of October. Please be assured, I am budgeting extra time to handle these demands! As always, though, it’s best to get them in early. The earlier you get them to me, the earlier you can get them to your binder. Promising clients albums before the holidays is stressful enough, so help yourself out and get them out before December 23!

Since all posts are better with designs, here’s a little holiday-themed album spread courtesy of Tamsin from AquarioStudio.com.

I have decided to discontinue my first promotion. Starting this week, there is no longer a 50% discount for your first album design. This obviously does not affect clients already using my services, as they already received this discount. Current promotions are available for DWF members and Bebbinar attendees, and I’m planning on more future promotions available for the general public in the coming months.

Since all posts are better with pictures, check out this spread!

fresh organic album design

I’ll update this post later with an example showing Willow Album Design packages and prices.

Get home, download cards into a premade folder. I have a master folder for each wedding client, with both wedding and engagement folders each containing the following folders: Album, Blog, Developed, LR Catalog, Orders, PickPic, Raw Keep, Raw Orig, Slideshow. I copy this master folder to the client folder and then download the raw images into the Raw Orig file. I copy to an external drive at this point.

I cull in Photo Mechanic, pressing the number “1″ for the keepers. I then transfer the keepers to the Raw Keep folder.

I open Lightroom, create a new catalog for this client, and save it in the LR Catalog folder, and then import into Lightroom all the images in the RAW Keep folder. Using Quikeys, I quickly process the wedding, rating my favorite images as I go using the increase rating key (before I used Quikeys, I just pressed “1″ to do this). Then I export into the Developed folder. — These are the images my clients receive if they have a package including the hi-res files.

I run a Photoshop batch resizing the images to 600px on the long side, and then upload those to my server for the PickPic cart. While those are uploading, I go back to the images rated with 1 star, and enhance these images, saving into the slideshow folder and the blog folder. At this point, I create the wedding or engagement’s blog post, and shortly thereafter the slideshow.

Super Duper backs up my Image Drive each night… so the raw files are always in three places: two internal hard drives and an external hard drive. I gave up burning DVDs of RAW files a while ago.

Next comes the album! I’ve already retouched my favorite images, and draw mostly from there. Of course, I sometimes go back to the Developed folder for an image that wasn’t my favorite but still necessary for the album.

Once finished, I copy the album .psd files to the external, and run another Photoshop batch to resize the images for project workroom so my client can view the album.