Project Idea: Albums: Take control, Improve Design, Make more Profit?

[fotografz]

It's the mid-winter doldrums. My thoughts turn to making more profit and improving the end product.

 

Three functional things I want to learn:

 

1) Final Cut Pro, which my Ad agency just bought (to expensive for a wedding photographer IMO, and

takes a long time to master).

 

2) Learn how to publish wedding movies with music, as well as back-up whole weddings off-site using

my Apple .mac account.

 

AND

 

3) learn "In Design" which I already have.

 

#3 may be of interest to others here for album design, advertising preparation and so on ... and what

many may not know is that if they have PhotoShop CS2, they ALSO already paid for this program.

 

The "CS" of PSCS2 stands for "Creative Suite" .... and part of that suite is "In Design", the most advanced

design program available. "In Design" has become THE layout & design standard used by Graphic

designers, art directors and the printing industry among others. Basically, it has replaced Quark.

 

What many also do not know is that it is all totally integrated by the browser in PSCS2 ... which is why it

was named "Bridge" ... it is a bridge between all the programs in CS2. You can "toggle" back-and-forth

between all these PSCS2 programs like In Design, Adobe Camera RAW, and PhotoShop using Bridge as

the "Traffic Controller". BTW, all of this is why Bridge takes so darn long to load. It's accessing all those

programs.

 

I know about this program even though I do not know how to use it yet, because my art directors use it

every day. Once learned, it is an extremely fast way to do page layout and integrate type, and it is much

higher quality than trying to do layouts using regular PS.

 

I was amazed to find that you can import RAW files directly from Bridge into a page layout to try it, and

wait to finalize later. Cropping can be done there, all kinds of design techniques applied, fading,

layering, etc.

 

You can create layout templates and save them ... yet alter them at will to customize your album

design. Client wants a change? Wants a different photo? To add a spread set? Add copy? All done in

seconds.

 

One of my art directors could do an entire album in a few hours. If you could get $100. per hour for

this work, it could increase your profit potential from each client contact, but more importantly put

your personal touch on the presentation of your work.

 

However, if you have absolutely no design sense what-so-ever, leave it to someone else. But, if that's

the case, you may be in the wrong business to start with : -)

 

Just a though from a mid-winter insomniac.

[regas chefas]

I think you're onto something here. I just got the Creative Suite and it's great. A little bit

of a learning curve, but I'm starting to get comfortable and do some great things.

 

They have "smart objects" which are smart enough to know that they've been edited and

which documents you've created using them. When you open the application that you're

using them in, they automatically update themselves. It's really cool, but you have to

make sure you save different versions of things if you're doing different crops and things

on images.

 

I've been buried in it for the last week and just got the first revision of my new weddings

website up. Now that I'm starting to grok it a little better, I could do what has taken me

the last week in about 2 hours :) (not counting the photo editing time that went into it)

 

Thanks for the interesting conversation topics.

[matt_k1]

I have Photoshop CS2, but not the whole "suite". Don't you have to purchase either the whole

CreativeSuite package to get all the apps or just get InDesign separately? Or does everyone

who has CS2 really get InDesign? I don't think I have it ... ?

[matt_k1]

Also, how does CS3 play into the picture? I'm heading over to the Adobe website right now...

[fotografz]

Matt, I'm not sure about this, but I think when it first came out PSCS2 was all integrated. At

least that's what I ended up with.

 

"In Design" hadn't taken over the layout business when it first came out, so it may have

been included to get it off the ground. Now it's the standard of the industry ... so they're

charging an arm and a leg for it as a stand alone. But from what I've seen, it's worth it. It'd

pay for itself with the first album or two.

 

 

The Adobe site now lists it as a separate product called PSCS2 Premium Edition, which has

all the design programs. You can get just PSCS2 as a stand alone .... which is misleading,

since it's not a "suite".

 

PSCS3 is probably an upgrade for just the Photoshop portion of the Creative Suite ... or for

those who have PSCS2 as a stand alone.

 

If you have the complete "Creative Suite", then there will be other programs from the suite

hiding in your applications folder. It isn't inside the PSCS2 folder with the feather on it ....

but in a plain folder titled "Adobe In Design". If you have that folder, then you most likely

have all the "Suite" programs, including "Version Cue", "Illustrator" and "Image Ready"

which are also amazing programs.

[sam_ellis]

Do you output your InDesign files as JPEGs to be printed or is there another option? I've used InDesign a little but haven't gotten too far. We have it for my new desktop publishing class, but we've been using Photoshop most of the year. 45 minutes a day doesn't allow us to speed through the learning curve quickly.

 

I'm intrigued.

[mattalofs]

Final Cut Express HD ($300) is a good compromise between the full blown version ($1500) and iMovie. For the PC there's a free version of Avid that's incredibly powerful, albeit insanely arcane in use.

 

Illustrator and Indesign only came with the suite versions of CS2.

 

You might find that backing up to that .mac account has a few limitations namely in terms of size and the upload speed of your internet connection. Unless you have commercial internet pipe, your upload and downloads are asynchronous (not at the same speed). Backing up 5 gigs to my webspace takes 4 or 5 days. You can run it in the background though.

[mike simons]

You can output to .PDF, .indd (InDesign Files); not sure about outputting to a whole JPG - and even if you could, I'd suggest .tif instead - better quality for printing. I shoot for my business, but am also a PShop & InDesign teacher at our local high school for our Yearbook program ---- everything that goes into InDesign (for images) goes in as .tif's. It's an INCREDIBLY powerful design program.

 

Too, you can lay in fonts apart from the 'basics' and use the "outline" function to have those fonts written into the document as rasterized images - thus when you submit the layouts/spreads/album, you need not worry whether your printer has the fonts - makes it i_iot-proof. (the forum emulator doesn like the word i_diot) Certainly, you can bundle the fonts in your submission to the printer, but the outline function (as well as InD's basic packaging functions) can do a lot of the work for you.

 

-mcs

[anner]

If you're interested in learning more about InDesign, as well as tips about other related tools,

you'd probably enjoy this blog....

 

http://www.newschoolphoto.com/

 

Kevin produced a great little introduction to InDesign on DVD as well:

http://www.newschoolphoto.com/blogme/software-video-series-indesign/

[matt_k1]

Does anyone know if there is an announced update of InDesign planned for Creative Suite 3 ?

I'm really liking what I'm seeing about the program from album design. Looks like a huge

time saver over doing layouts in photoshop.

[matt_k1]

Never mind. There is a CS3 version coming soon.

[rob_s___san_francisco_bay_]

Thanks for this thread Marc. I think albums are a huge selling point and marketing tool

and I'm going to be focusing much more energy in that direction this year. I think

InDesign could really help.

<p>

Also thanks to Anne for that New School link.<p>

It's raining here so I just spent the last few hours watching Kevin's video tutorial and

playing around with the trial version of CS2 InDesign (I don't have the whole Creative

Suite). It really is rather easy to get going and I can see many advantages over

Photoshop.<p>

One question... Does anyone using InDesign have a good solution for the lack of high-res

JPG exports? Do you know which album companies & printers accept PDF's? Do you do as

Kevin mentioned and create JPGs from the PDF's (less desirable because it means spending

more money to get the full version of Acrobat) ? Or hopefully the new version of InDesign

will have better export options including JPG.

[fotografz]

I'll ask my Executive Art Director if jpgs can be used for output.

 

Could it be just saving a flattened 8 bit copy? I know there's all kinds of options with In-

Design, and you can save every version of a job as you work. My guys print out quick

copies for proofing all the time. I'm sure they aren't huge multi-layered files, but I don't

know what format it is. Probably PDFs.

 

I googled "Convert PDF to Jpg" and there's all kinds of utilities available ... like this one:

 

http://www.eprintdriver.com/to_jpeg/PDF-to-JPEG-ex.html

[pete_s.]

Open the pdf from indesign in photoshop. Select "page" (upper left) and choose what resolution you want it in (300dpi?). Photoshop will open your page and you can save it as whatever.

[picturesque]

InDesign didn't come with my copy of PS2. Oddly enough, I was on another forum when I ran across a post about album design software in which a person said they used CorelDraw to design album spreads, a software package that I had from long before. Intrigued, I opened up CorelDraw and indeed--you can use it to easily design album spreads if you are already familiar with the software. Using a feature called Power Clip, you can pop images into shapes, complete with automatic frames and drop shadows if you wish. I'm sure the features are similar to InDesign and Illustrator/PageMaker/Quark. So if anyone has CorelDraw or can get a copy cheaply, it might be worth looking at.