Fresh, Organic Album Design for Professional Photographers - Willow Album Design - Wedding Album Design for Professional Photographers » album workflow

The Workflow Post

adminbritney — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:09:23 +0000

In an effort to help clients, I’m going to post my own workflow for an average wedding.

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 (it’s conveniently located next to the arrow keys). 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.

A Monster “Green Label” Album Design

adminbritney — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:43:51 +0000

Images courtesy of Turn Loose the Art and Joe Rumore Photographer

The wedding of two photographers means a lot of things, and one of them is that the focus is largely on the images — a perfect task for my Green Label design style.

Green Label Album Design for Etched in Time

adminbritney — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:40:55 +0000

Miguel Pola asked me to design a large, 50-page 8×12 album for a beautiful wedding he shot recently. The details were vivid and the images bright, so we stuck with a Green Label design to keep the focus on the images.

Here are a few of my favorite spreads:

A Green Label Vendor Album Design

adminbritney — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:58:55 +0000

Mark Gardner asked me to design a simple album to be displayed at a venue he works often. I went through his galleries, picked out the images from five different weddings, and designed him an album that is sure to send a bunch of clients his way!

This is a Green Label Willow Album Design

Mark will be self-binding this album for a fully custom presentation!

Bold Red – Album Design

adminbritney — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:48:13 +0000

Barbara’s wedding was done with a bold red, and I knew her album needed to reflect that. This color-blocked style album fits perfectly!

Brick Red – Green Label (Complete Album Design)

adminbritney — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:47:27 +0000

The venues brick and stone walls and vibrant lanterns really dictated a simple design for this Green Label album.

A little Tiffany and Chocolate (twice) – Album Design

adminbritney — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:25:58 +0000

This destination wedding was heavy on the colorful details.

Green Label design

Chocolate (Complete Album Design)

adminbritney — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:50:46 +0000

This is a complete album design in the color-blocked style.

And, as a bonus, the cover design for this album

Embellished and Red (Complete Album Design)

adminbritney — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:25:31 +0000

Images courtesy of Joe Rumore Photographer

Organic Album – original 30 page design

Lavender – Album Design

adminbritney — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:41:22 +0000

This wedding with lavender accents was a simple, family-oriented wedding in a vineyard setting. The album design reflects the quiet elegance in organic accents.

Brenda's Organic wedding album design