today's video is going to be all about wedding albums! some design tips, some
behind-the-scenes of how I design my albums, and some best practices for you
for how you can get your images to look professional and beautiful, so let's dive
in!! we are inside of my design software this is: Fundy designer this is how I
create all of my albums it's super quick and this is just a blank slate after
you've created a template of whatever size and parameters you'll be designing
in so the first thing I'm going to do is go down here and click add photos I have
an album on my desktop that have images that I want to use these are the
favorites from within a gallery that I sent to my couples and clients which
make a really nice starting point for any album so what I like to do is grab
all the favorites these are the highlights from beginning to end this is
really going to help set the scene and tell the story of the entire day so I
grabbed all these favorites I'm importing them and then what I'll do is
grab any additional complementary images that I need to bring into the album to
just give it any finishing touches that I feel that it needs once
I have laid out some of the like base design but what I'm gonna do is go ahead
and just add a bunch of spreads and you'll see the page count starts going
up and then let's go back to view and make sure this is the right amount of
spreads now that I have my 15 laid out I know that for my first initial page in
my design I'm gonna go ahead and get some stuff to just set the scene of the
day if you want to grab an entire page and go ahead and just relocate it to
somewhere else in the day like for this for instance I know I want they're
getting ready pictures to come before the ceremony pictures and then maybe I
have the first look images here I know these will probably come before
something else but if I want to move this
add more getting ready images you just grab this and move it around alright so
I'm just gonna continue along here making sure I go from some scene setting
images to getting ready images first look portraits portraits and then we're
gonna move into ceremony so I've decided to swap out this image that you see here
with the mosaic and put it in the beginning so I'm gonna go in here and
just get rid of that I'll delete it and then let's go ahead and play around with
this design a little bit you can click layout and see very quickly a lot of
possibilities for how you'd like your images to appear I think that I'm gonna
stick with something like this so I'm just playing around with these images to
see which one of these I would like to be the first cover
well not the cover but the inside when you first open up the album I want it to
make a statement about you know what the day is gonna really look like and how
this wedding is gonna unfold so I think those first few images are really
special you can drag and reposition these images to make sure that this fits
really nicely you can even change like the tilt of an image you can just do so
so much it's really nice to not have to leave the design software so now that I
have most of my most important images that I know my client would want in this
album to be in the album I go ahead and I add in a few supplementary images
because I want to keep straight what I've added what I haven't added so now
I'm importing a couple of extra images and some tips that I want to share with
you for making sure that your album design is cohesive and it makes sense is
just a couple of things so for example on this specific design here I'm going
to zoom in and show you this is a great example of making sure that your clients
faces right here on the right hand side don't fall in this crease because
when you go ahead and you actually fold the book itself you want to make sure
that the faces aren't anywhere in the middle because they will start to
distort and it won't look great so as I go through and I finalize improve I make
sure I scan through all my designs and I make sure that this black line down the
middle does not touch people's faces so that's a really important one to look at
and so I went through did a good check that looks really great the other tip
that I have for you is alternate your designs based on the pages so for
example this first page I have four images then I alternate and I'm using
eight now I'm back to four too this one doesn't really alternate and then it
goes back to four then we go up in numbers down in numbers all the way down
to one it's gonna be way more interesting as the person flipping
through the album if they're able to see some variance between the number of
images on the page some of them being black and white some of the main color
and each page changing just a little bit in design and layout before I finish up
I want to give you guys one more tip one thing you'll notice in my designs is
that I'm very intentional about using white space and making sure that not
every page has pictures that go all the way to the edge and this is really gonna
give the viewer a chance to look at what the subject really is not feel bombarded
or overwhelmed by how many pictures there are in like each design and it
gives them a little bit of a break between images a really cool trick that
Fundy allows is that if you select a design and hit the spacebar on your
keyboard you can completely flip the design so if you wanted to have this
image come first if you want to change this one around completely
I had the details first and then the getting ready photos but I kind of like
how it's broken up this way so that when you come from this design to this design
you get the break of having a black and white image that you can see right away
so it's kind of fun to see how it would look if you went ahead and
some of the images and sometimes it can be a really nice break if you were on a
detail image on the previous page and then you get to the next page you may
want to start with some people and then stop with details so that whenever you
get to the following page it can be people again again this is just so that
you're keeping things interesting and you're moving the eye from spread to
spread and that way it it flows the best that it possibly can once I'm happy with
the images that I've chosen I'm happy with the layout I make sure that there's
lots of variance among the design the placement I make sure nobody's faces
fall into the crease where the album itself is gonna fold I go up here to the
top and I export for print you also have the option to export for proofer when
I'm working with my clients this is where I will start I will save an entire
gallery just for proofing and then let them review the album before I send it
to the printer but today I'm gonna send to print so I'm going to export and then
create a new folder you can go ahead and name it something where you'll be able
to find it easily place it on your desktop and click create if you're
watching this and thinking okay I love the idea of designing an album but how
do I actually get clients to buy albums go ahead and check out the video on your
screen right now and I will give you some tips for how to sell more wedding
albums in your photography business I'll see you over there