Workflow is yours costing cash

Workflow is yours costing cash???? -Part 2

After recent attempts to speed up the workflow indicated in the last article, I have recently purchased a firewire card reader, albeit a bit more expensive than Mikes measly £7, but extremely effective.

You may recall my download times being in the region of 13mins for a 512MB card. This has significantly been reduced to just under 3mins chopping a whopping 50 minutes off waiting to transfer them to the computer. Equate the time saving to money any I'm £50 better off!!

You may also recall that album design takes up a fair old chunk of time. Even with some cute action and batch processes it still took me the best part of 4hours to produce a typical album without interruption. How often does that happen? Two products have become available to me, which the manufacturers claim provide easy access to quick album design. The first programme is an Epson product, which was provided for review purposes. The second program was a product recommended to me by Bambi Cantrell during her recent visit. The proof of the pudding…as they say.

Epson Album Maker

This program requires Epson Page Proofer or EPPlayout to be installed prior to running Album Maker .These products were not provided on our demonstration copy and therefore we have had to defer the testing.

Revised Timings (Minutes)

Yervant Page Gallery 2

Yervant is a well respected photographer from Australia who has developed a system of page layouts for use with almost any album, either square or rectangular.The product is not cheap ($500US) but having used the software in anger I can safely say that it's worth the money.What previously took me 4 hours to produce is now down to just 1 hour, including minor fiddling to get it right. The program is simple and intuitive to use and I found no problem in designing my first album without reference to the manual. A demonstration or evaluation copy can be downloaded from the photographer's website www.yervant.com; just to see if you like it. It has only 5 album page designs for trial purposes, but when you download the full version there are over 2200 templates to choose from.

The only difficult operation is the installation process but detailed instructions are provided and it all went smoothly. In order to process the page designs the program makes use of Photoshop actions to resize, add drop shadows, crop and these actions need to be loaded into Photoshop one by one. It gets a bit tedious but the end result is well worth it. With everything installed you can get on with the serious business of designing your first album.

Simply open the program and start a new project. Decide on the album type (i.e. square, rectangular, double page etc), and where you want to save the layout, then the program launches into the opening screen. You can change the album layout design at this stage (say from rectangular to square) or start to load in you images. I found it easy to load the images into the 'misc' folder and drag the individual images into the other category folders from there. You can re-label the folders by selecting the options within the preferences dialogue.

Next select a page template from the list available by choosing the required number of vertical and horizontal pictures to be included and add the page to the album. Then drag the image from the folder into the designated box, where it will be suitably sized. You can reposition, rotate and crop images using the simple slider mechanism at the right hand side of the screen. Double clicking on the image in the folder will open the image in Photoshop, allowing minor retouching or other tweaks to be undertaken prior to loading into your page.

Workflow You can now make the page, or continue to build up additional pages, adding them one page at a time. The only aggravating thing I found was that page previewing can only take place when the page has been 'made'. When complete all the pages can be made at once and Photoshop whirrs into action whilst you make a cup of tea. The whole album is made automatically in about 35 minutes.

Pages are saved in psd format allowing you to access individual pages in layers for last minute tweaking. The program also creates a small low-resolution file with flattened jpeg images ready for slideshow presentations.

For serious album makers, it's a godsend and frees up 3 hours of my time, saving about £150. It goes without saying that those of you who have extended workflow problems should take a serious look at not only this software but many others like it. Glorious Books, Photoimpact, Epson Album Maker, Pro Album Art, Bellwood and Campdale Album templates all do similar things at varying price ranges. You just have to find the one that works best for you and fits in with your style of album design. Come to the SWPP Convention in January and you will find many of these programs on show.

Yervant

Part 1

The SWPP 2008 Convention was an outstanding success,
we have 43 days to get ready for the 2009 convention - which starts on January 14, 2009

Photo Quote: Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way. - Edward de Bono