Wedding Album

<p>elp... HELP!!!</p>

<p>Need to print a good quality wedding album... not sure where to start. I have the pictures edited and saved, but what sites are good. I know there's a lot to consider... <br>

-Good quality printing<br>

-Software to put an album together<br>

-Customer Service<br>

- Price<br>

- Options for layout / editing<br>

etc</p>

<p>Anyone print a 100+ page book, of good quality result. I am not sure how many pages it will turn out to be, but I'm expecting more than 100 pages.</p>

In the US, try AdoramaPix. They print on real photographic paper and have a leather bound option for their photo books. Don't know if they can support 100 pages, but its a good option if you are not a professional photographer.

<p>Kenneth - I'm not a "professional" by definition. But I do want a professional quality product (album), as my images are up to snuff.<br>

What options are there for the so called Professional. I'm willing to pay for genuine quality.</p>

<p dir="ltr">My sense is that you may think this is an easy question. It's not.<br>

</p>

<p dir="ltr">There are lots of services that make photo books. There's definitely a very wide range of quality and price. But getting a "good quality" book isn't like buying "good quality" wine, where you just pay more and voilà: good quality! My friends who know something about wine tell me this doesn't work with wine either, but never mind about that. Perhaps a better analogy would be cooking. Cooking a really good meal isn’t just a matter of knowing what market to shop at or even how to tell good asparagus from mediocre asparagus, good sirloin from mediocre sirloin. It’s knowing what to do with the ingredients that makes the meal. Now, I’m not a great cook, but I’m a good cook, and I know that anybody who can read a recipe and follow instructions can probably get into the ballpark of a good meal. I’m not a great book designer, either, but I am a good one, and I know that turning raw photos into a well-cooked book is harder than turning raw veggies and meat into a well-cooked meal. One stalk of asparagus is much like another and there's not a lot of difference between plates, either. But every photo on every page of a book requires careful, special consideration. <br>

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<p dir="ltr"><strong>Option 1: Hire a pro</strong><br>

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<p dir="ltr">You asked about a “good quality” book. Part of the difficulty providing an answer to your question lies in the fact that I have no idea what you mean by “good quality,” and I bet you don’t either. <br>

</p>

<p dir="ltr">If, like Oscar Wilde, you have simple tastes and you are satisfied by what nearly everybody describes as the best, then give this job to an experienced and respected book designer. This person might also be an experienced and respected professional photographer, but doesn’t have to be. If the photographer who took the photos for you in the first place is experienced with book design, then by all means, go back to him or her. But outside the expensive end of the market these days, an awful lot of excellent photographers have limited experience in book design. That’s why, if you’ve got the money to pay for it, I recommend that you find a book designer.<br>

</p>

<p dir="ltr">You’ll want someone in your city. Visit with them and review actual books that they've made for clients, then pay them to do the job. You might find someone willing to do it for less, but I'd expect prices to start at $1000. There is a lot of work involved in making a book, and the cost of printing a 'professional' flush-mount wedding album starts around $200 (for a small book with very few pages or 'sides') and goes through the roof from there. It's not difficult to spend a couple of thousand dollars for printing and binding alone (i.e. for the wholesale production of the book) and the photographer/designer will of course want to be paid something over and above that for the work involved.<br>

</p>

<p dir="ltr">NOTE: If you do hire somebody good to do this job, one of the first questions they’re going to ask you is, Do you have the raw files? Do you? Unless you shot the wedding yourself, you probably don’t. Most photographers don’t give clients the raw files, and many won’t even sell them. If you have high-res jpegs, the job can be done. But raw files would be better.<br>

</p>

<p dir="ltr">Do be aware that simply hiring an experienced book designer to design the book and having it printed by a very good quality printer doesn’t mean that you’ll get a top-quality product. I've attended a lot of seminars given by superstar wedding photographers like Jerry Ghionis, Yervant, Robert Valenzuela, and others. Personally I think some of them are actually shooting for the magazine cover — but what they all talk about is <em>shooting for the book.</em> They shoot for the book for the same reason Willy Sutton robbed banks: because that’s where the money is. At that level, the cost of the book is measured in hundreds of dollars per side (‘page’). In some cases I'm familiar with, the book alone cost almost as much as I paid last year for a new truck.<br>

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<p dir="ltr"><strong>Option 2: The old-fashioned album</strong><br>

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<p dir="ltr">Now, there is good news. You do not have to mortgage the house to achieve your goal. If you want the very best quality presentation of the photos in a ‘package’ that will last well for decades, don’t look for a bound book at all. <br>

</p>

<p dir="ltr">Instead, look for a high-quality old-fashioned album, one with big, acid-free blank pages and plastic page covers, with the ability to buy and insert additional pages. Pick the best fifty or so images from the wedding and have them printed by a professional printing lab. Finally, arrange the images any way you like in the book. If you take this approach, you can have something lovely to pull out and show your grandchildren on your fiftieth wedding anniversary. A big advantage here is that you’ll get really high-quality prints this way. Matching this print quality in a bound book causes the price to jump by a huge amount.<br>

</p>

<p dir="ltr">CAVEAT: Preparing the images for printing at a pro lab will still require work and skill, if you want it done right. But the advantage here is that you can assemble the album piece by piece, checking the quality constantly. That is, you can spend $50 on printing, decide whether you like what you got, and change labs if necessary. (But almost any lab in the country should be able to do a satisfactory job with the printing, so if you're not getting the results you want, it's probably because you're not sending them the files they need or you're selecting the wrong options. Time to talk to somebody.)<br>

</p>

<p dir="ltr">This is really good advice and I take no credit for it. It’s a time-tested idea, and was first suggested to me years ago as alternative to more expensive wedding albums by our own Bob Bernardo. So you really should think about it carefully.<br>

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<p dir="ltr">•<br>

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<p dir="ltr"><strong>Option 3: the modern 'pretty good' bound book</strong><br>

<br>

But I understand that the page-printed books have a certain special appeal, and if you really want to go this route, then by all means, go with one of the well-known services like AdoramaPix or Blurb or Picaboo. I’ve even had good results ordering direct through Aperture from Apple (although I’ve never figured out who does their printing). AdoramaPix was recommended in this thread already and others here at photo.net have spoken well of it. I've used half a dozen other services, most of them more than once. But there ten or twenty times more services that I've never tried. <br>

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<p dir="ltr">These services are geared to people who don’t make books every week or every month and they’ll help you as much as possible. Some of them (most of them?) will even do custom color correction, although you’ll still want your images to be as close to ‘perfect’ as possible when you upload them. Be aware that even this option is going to require work on your part and it won’t be cheap, either. Get into this and I predict you’ll change your mind about wanting 100 pages. But that’s fine: you should change your mind about that. I don’t care who shot your wedding: You don’t have 100+ pages worth of photos that merit being printed in a bound book. And <a href="https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/maewest141679.html">Mae West to the contrary notwithstanding</a>, it is indeed possible to have too much of a good thing.<br>

</p>

<p dir="ltr">Also, try to moderate your expectations. I don’t know what you expect and it’s possible that when your package arrives from Blurb, you’ll cry tears of joy to see how beautiful your book is. On the other hand, you may not — certainly won’t if you were expecting a one-time print order you paid $150 for to be as beautiful as that coffee table of Ansel Adams images you saw last week at the bookstore. It’s absolutely not a bad idea to place a small order at first and see what you think. <br>

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<p dir="ltr">•<br>

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<p dir="ltr"><strong>Why is this so hard?</strong> <br>

</p>

<p dir="ltr">You might be asking yourself, Why is this so hard? Better question is, Why does anybody think this should be easy?<br>

</p>

<p dir="ltr">Producing an wedding album isn’t a single activity: it’s a concert of activities, including the taking of the original photos, judicious selection of the better images, color correction and editing, proper export of the images, page layout and editing, selection of media (paper and covers), printing, binding and delivery. You want a truly excellent result, you need excellence at every stage of the process. Creating a really nice wedding album is like putting together a really nice one-person show in an art or photo gallery. It’s not just a lot of work: it demands that knowledge and talent and good taste be brought to bear on a large number of decisions.<br>

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<p dir="ltr">Taking (or having) really nice photos is just the first step. After that, you need someone who knows how to edit images for printing, someone working with the right ICC profile(s) on a properly color-calibrated system so that, for example, the bride’s dress doesn’t look peach-colored if it wasn’t. The images that your photographer delivered to you were (probably) processed for digital display; but if you’re going to spend a lot of money on the printing, you’ll get the best result if the images are re-processed for printing, ideally from the original raw files, so that you can do the best job possible of dealing with output sharpening (and noise reduction, if necessary). Once you’ve got the content ready, you need design skills and good taste to put it all together in a way that not only makes sense but will continue to make sense for decades. Good taste is really important, and unfortunately, the consumer-oriented services can’t help on that score.<br>

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<p dir="ltr">In short, there are a lot of ways to go wrong. I'm moderately experienced at this and I'm surprised occasionally at the way the printed book looks: In an album I made a year or two ago, I'd done a two-page full-bleed 'centerfold' type spread in which the bride and groom were looking meaningfully into each other's ideas across the middle fold. It looked <em>great</em> on my computer screen, and I had (I thought) separated the two faces a bit to accommodate the fact that some of the image sort of gets lost in the fold. Even so, in the first book that came back, their faces were too close to the folder. I fixed it, kept that one for myself, and placed another order for the bride.</p>

<p dir="ltr"> </p>

<p dir="ltr">Point is, your book will almost certainly have problems. With luck, they'll be small. You might not even notice them when you first get the book. Maybe you'll never notice them. And that’s fine and good. Enjoy the book!<br>

</p>

<p dir="ltr">But remember, this is a book that you’re going to look at over and over again. Even a non-pro will start to notice certain mistakes after looking at the same pages again and again. If you are not the sort of person who straightens the diplomas on the wall while you wait in a doctor’s office, if you are not the sort of person who corrects other people’s spelling or rearranges the table settings at restaurants, if you are not the sort of person who quietly critiques the design of every website you visit — then don’t even think about undertaking this job on your own.<br>

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<p dir="ltr">•<br>

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<p dir="ltr">To recap. If you want top-quality printing for the best price, get the best photos printed by a pro printing lab, then place them into a high-quality free-form album. While you’re at it, pick the two or three very best photos, have them printed large and frame them! But if you really want a book, then pick one of the consumer-oriented services. Few of them guarantee your satisfaction, so don't place a $500 order unless you've already made a less-expensive trial run with that service. But the consumer-oriented services will make it as easy as possible to do a pretty good job and in this context, pretty good is probably good enough. Indeed, good enough is all any of us can truly hope for: perfection is not attainable. <br>

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<p dir="ltr">Will</p>

While William has provides a lot of information and useful suggestions, I think it is certainly possible for a good amateur photographer to get good results using one of the photo book services. I like Adorama because they use real photographic paper to generate their books and not a magazine based printing process. I typically convert my RAW images in Lightroom to full resolution JPEGs and convert to sRGB color space. Having a calibrated monitor does help. I would also recommend producing a set a 4" x 6" proofs through Adorama, from which you can then make appropriate brightness and color corrections for the follow on photo book. They have online software to arrange the images within the book and once a book is set up, others who you invite can review and print their own copy of the book (and pay for it of course).

 

Best of luck

<p>good quality albums<br>

black river imaging<br>

use their own software to develop, save and edit your designs<br>

you can also order straight out of the software</p>

 

<p>Are you ready your albums? If you don't have prepared, you can use <a href="http://www.amoyshare.com/photo-collage-maker-for-mac/">Photo Collage Maker for Mac</a> yourself to cut the wedding cost. Best wishes to you. </p>

<p>Make the wedding album by yourself. Wish you have a best wedding day. </p>

<p>I agree that an album of 100 pages is...probably way too much! <br />In our typical album designs, we average between 2 and 2.5 images per page...so 100 pages would use about 200-250 images. We suggest getting the images down to 50 - 150. And an album that big would, in my opinion, be far too big to be enjoyed in one sitting.<br>

<br />If you could be happy with an album of 30 - 70 pages, for example, you've got choices:<br>

1. Flush mount albums: stiffer, hard pages, normally designed with multiple images per page. Page surfaces are photographic prints bonded to stiff substrate and lay flat when opened. Hard covers of leather, photo-wrap, fabric, metallic, or other materials. Examples are Zookbinders ZookBook, West Coast Albums, PictoBooks, Graphistudio, Finao Albums, etc.<br>

<br />2. Press-printed albums: high-quality paper pages and hard covers. Pages designed in magazine style similar to flush mount albums. Printing typically using 4 or 6-color print press technology. Less expensive that flush mount albums. Cover options similar to flush mount + soft cover options. Examples are Blurb, AsukaBook, etc.<br>

Most of the albums we create for bridal or photographer clients are flush mount albums. We design the page layouts and offer printing and binding from 11 album companies. It's another way for client to get pro album otherwise not available.<br>

There are other services, of course, and we always suggest doing a free sample design with whomever you're considering to design your album before you sign up for a high-end album.<br>

Best,<br>

john givens</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Hi,<br>

Some of the replies to your enquiry make out as if it's 'Rocket Science' to produce a wedding album.<br>

I use a company in Europe called Albelli, I am sure you have similar companies in the States.<br>

I produce the albums off line and upload when finished and they take a couple of weeks to print. <br>

I offer an album as part of my wedding package and to date have had no complaints about quality.<br>

They cost about $100 to produce and that is for about 100 glossy pages. I belong to Amazon Local, similar to Groupon, and they often have Albelli vouchers on offer for 100 page albums for $30. <br>

An example of one of my albums can be seen at http://www.albelli.co.uk/view-online-photo-book/18f41ce7-d282-445c-a2a0-5f655365d1a6<br>

One tip for producing albums is to not use the album software but to produce each page or double page spread in Photoshop or Lumapix, which is what I use. Save the page as a jpeg or similar to the size of your album page and import as a photo. This gives you a lot more flexibility and not restricted to the album software. If you want to see any more examples of albums then just email me.<br>

Joe</p>

<p><img src="http://kingsleaf.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/KL1.jpg" alt="" />If you are looking for wedding album you can check out www.kingsleaf.com<br>

Previously available to professional photographers only.<br />The pricing is affordable, it's a full feature wedding album.<br /><br />Cheers.</p>