Lessons

Lesson Info

Designing Albums Fast Part 2

For those of you who are complete control freaks you can also send it toe in design and so what we've just done is we had a purchased basically a purchased an employee for three hundred dollars which is my album design employees for three hundred dollars and if I use the fifty dollars off code from smart albums for two hundred fifty bucks I purchased an employee that will work for me for my albums every single time I want himto work without having ever have to pay them another dime right? And so I've got that employee and its job is to do the design to get it done get the bulk of the work done you remember yesterday we talked about the ninety ten rule let something or someone else do ninety percent of the work and then you do ten percent of the work this is gonna happen here is well ninety ten rules in effect ninety percent of the work was done by a computer and then ten percent of the work can be done by you later you can open photos off if you like tio there or you can open it on in ...

design and start messing around with it and changing it and in in design it's literally taking they're sending out the same specs to in design so that is making the same spread and it's putting the photos in the same spot but it's it's actual access to the photos so in design is operating as it normally does but it's like it's like you just did all of this design in five minutes and in design and then you can tweak it to your heart's content so if you click on idea mel for in design and tell it to export all the spreads and you're gonna tell it where to export it so we're gonna put it in the album production folder and I export when it does that it's exporting all the spreads as like a little database that tells in design what to do with spreads and then from there and I'm gonna just going to save this we no longer need to really look at this so I'm gonna hide this gonna hide that I'm gonna hide photoshopped army light room and I'm going to go to our album here that's the idea mil right there and if I open up in design so when we open in design we just simply have to go in and import that into in design so I'm gonna go to file open I'm gonna track down that same album production folder there it is the altman wedding and I hit open and now it's going to take a little while because it has to read all of that has to produce something but in just a few minutes it's going toe produce that same album in in design completely uh it's it's the original photos that so so smart bombs did nothing to the photos all they did is tell in design where they go on the page and now in design is looking at the pictures which means I can design a mall in j peg then I could go on re working on tiff and whatever and saved the tips over the top of the j pegs and then just tell in design swap out all those j pegs for the tips that are next to him and now we have sixteen bit images that we've been working on inside of you indesign available so I mean the thie amount of trickery you can do at this point is is out of this world and it's something like these guys are very open to people you know helping them with the software and communicating with them about changes well they love hearing request for changes but I will say this they're not going to listen to changes they not goingto add things just add them because I they really understand workflow and so that's and that's the reason they did such a good job because most people write software and they put everything into the software that anybody might want and that's a wrong way to create software the reason apple is so good at what they do is because steve jobs was arrogant enough to say I know the right way and everybody else is wrong and sell by doing by having that mentality he forced people into a pathway and the pathway is right most of the time and so most of the time and so that pathway forces people into a really good pattern right and so these guys were forcing us into a very fast workflow and they don't want add things like text and whatever because you already have photoshopped for text you already have in design for text all they want to do is provide the design very quickly and then once I get into in design all I have to do is go to my pages here and I just have to add one spread not that I want to add they're so I want to add a spread and I'll grab this guy and pull it down on the other side here like that and now I go to this spread here and this is where I'll add my text I can say that this is a nice wedding and I can change that because now in design is the gold standard for working on text why would you make an inferior text editor in your software when you have the superior one right available to at the very in process that's when I'll add my text you know there's no reason to recreate photo shopper in design it's already there right so a couple questions about the cover design how do you implement the cover design you mean like what kind of cover and all that what if there is going to a photo or you know so cover design is all based on your provider and there's a thousand options and so that's not part of that they're designing what's inside the cover when you get when you upload your j pegs rps, d's or whatever to your album designer it's going ask you what kind of cover you want most of the time it's just a leather cover with a stamp on it but if it's some kind of cover design that needs a photo that's when you take a photo and upload it to him say I want this to be the cover design or if you need to do that photo shop go out and do it in a photo shop so you're going to design the cover based on what the needs of your particular cover's gonna be mine are usually just leather covers or canvas covers or something like that you had a question uh okay so if you didn't want it do any further modification than smart albums can upload directly to in your case white house custom color no in this case the way I then upload um is I export so I go file export album spreads and I'm going to ignore the limitations because obviously we're not actually sending this on I make them is a j peg because that's what the client or what? What needs to go up on line to the white house and I'm going tio send out all spreads just the way they want him and if for some reason my my company wants me to send out single pages so it cuts the spread and puts them on single pages I can click that and it will do that for me and we'll put them side by side or and then I just hit export once I export its going to export those images and let me let me export these two album production and create a folder called j pegs create and then I export and now those spreads air going out and then for white house white house uses the rose system which is an amazingly simple system and pretty much any lab that's of any real value uses a rose system because it's just a drag and drop I simply go into rose click on rose it opens java it opens a window where I can then drag images and order whatever album I want and so I opened up this system just dragged those images into it I don't populate it choose my cover and hit go so the ordering system is independent of the book are the designer so if you went into photoshopped than to make modifications or into in designing make modifications you then have them exported eso if the workflow is this you you work in tandem between light room and smart albums to create the design and then if you like the design as is from smart albums you export the spreads if you want to modify the design than from smart albums you go to indesign or you go to photo shop and then from those programs that's those programs make the final spreads for you and then once you've made those spreads you upload those spreads toe whatever specific whatever whatever ordering system they've created because each album producer creates a different ordering system now in order to show you what we've created white house custom colors actually sent us the album that I was just working on so and it was designed this album by the way this album was designed at w p p ay on the show floor in two and a half minutes so I was working a little slower than I normally dio so this is a two and a half minute album and it never left smart albums so it went directly from smart albums to j peg upto white house custom color printed and back to me and here's the real kicker I designed this in two and a half minutes now that doesn't count all of my work on the photos and stuff like that so that obviously there was more effort done to the photos the photos or what's important designed it in two and a half minutes designed it here again in five and a half minutes because I wanted to be a little bit freer, but when I ordered it, I ordered it on. Maybe I ordered it on tuesday, I think it wass of last week, and it was sitting here in the studio waiting for me on thursday or friday of that same week, so when we're talking about fast, that's, amazing, so whatever white house does is voodoo fast. They're amazing at what they do because they do it fast and they do it with quality. So here's the book I am going to show it first to the camera so they can see so it's a nice leather cover it's kind of a thick page design, but there's the book there's those spreads beautifully printed, beautifully done beautiful designs, and the really important thing to note is that some of these images, like especially when they're square or they're a little bit elongated smart albums actually has is accessing facial recognition, and so it knows where faces are, and it won't crop out of face. So when there's a square image, when you create a square image and I'll show you this in the second, when you just square image, it knows there's a face there. And even if it's a square image and it might naturally crop it off by putting it in the center it knows is a face over here shifts it over to make sure that it doesn't crop out the main the main face sent yeah jod droppingly cool because it's looking for faces when it's designing the album that's impressive and so here's the design here is the album and it's perfect so and the couple the altman couple that lovingly gave us permission to do all of this for them I'm going to be sending him this book and so I'm really excited to send it to him because they graciously they went through and got releases from every single person at their wedding and s o we're sending that to him and the scots did the same thing and so sometime in the next few days I'm going to be designing an album for them in two and a half minutes and I'm gonna send then and I hope emma's well of their beautifully done pictures done by white house in this style so beautiful here you take that and all those plate pages lay flat yeah, all of my flat so it's a seamless yeah so if I go back to smart albums inside of smart albums, if I go too let's just say this design here I'm going to choose a design that's that's full of you know there's got squares and if I can find see let's find out very um let's look for something that's not exact match, but that has their squares there's some square see that? So I click on that square. If I look at this, it could've cropped her here. It could've cropped her down there, but it knows the face so automatically cropped her correctly. So if I go like this and go here, see that it cropped her correctly there because obviously full frame. But then when I go back and crop it, ifyou hopes go back and I hover over the square one there let's see there see outcrops air correctly because it knows her face that's amazing. So when you are doing an album to recap, when you're doing an album, you need to first start in light room, you create your images in collection, you've put him in the collections, and then you kind of work with those images and put him in the order that you want him or, you know, figure out what which images you want to use which images don't adjust them. How are you want in light room? And then you're going to create a published service that published service is always going to be in the same place it's always the album production folder send those out to the album production folder by creating a production album production folder underneath that published service. So if I go here, go to the public service right click, create a published folder for that specific album, drag your images into it and publish it that creates the connection point. Then you open up smart albums and you dragged that folder in, and that creates the connection point too smart albums, and then you start working on the album. Once you're done with the album, look at the spreads, go backto light room change anything that needs changed based on the relationship of the photos to the spreads and those than when you publish those will automatically updated smart, smart albums and from smart albums, you can either go to photoshopped or two in design to kind of work on those. Additionally, if you want teo or you can send him directly from there to spreads and upload them to whatever service you're interested in using that's the album workflow and I have never seen a faster, better album work full than that and it's it's all result it's all a result of really intelligent design between light room creating published services and smart album's doing what they do best in design and then connecting the two together. And then, of course, smart albums being smart enough to realize that photo shop is great at certain things, and so is in designed so connecting to those so smart albums was smart enough to realize that there are things around them that are better than what they are, and so they do what they're great at. They specialize in quick and simple album design, and then they connect you to the things that are great at what they do. And again, if you look at any software or any service out there that's for a photographer, if they really care about you and they really care about making your life easier and make care about giving you a good opportunity for profit, they will connect to the best things they won't try and do it themselves. They will connect to the best things, and they will do their part the best way they can and connect to the things that do their part the best they can it's all interconnected. And if we live that way and we worked that way with that symbiotic relationship, then you'll find that life becomes easy and that the effort of doing your job becomes very easy and now there's nothing wrong with telling my client it took two and a half minutes to design that album there's nothing wrong with that it's, a beautiful album and I got to design it but I was able to do it with a tool that helped me to do it very fast I know that you use a lot of products in your business, you know, prince books and all sorts of things so this might be not sure about this question, but could you give us a ballpark on the wholesale cost on that book? I believe that that book is about I don't know I don't remember how many pages we have now but it's maybe four hundred dollars five hundred dollars or not really sure on the exact cost on it, but I think it's around ballparks grate there like a ballpark for a cost yes for what you're paying foreign materials is between three hundred and five hundred dollars ish for opening a white house custom color book it depends if you just get the base one with like twenty pages it's fairly inexpensive you know you could get one for like thank you khun walk out the door for about two hundred bucks for something or a hunter even in the hundreds but as you have pages then it starts to grow kiss wedding books is a very reasonable price great and they have cem kiss actually has some they're tuscan is awesome, so I mean if you're if you're looking for a really amazing book that's really well crafted and also printed very quickly I'm here in the united states kiss wedding books does the tuscan book is phenomenal it's so beautiful and they are reasonable reasonably priced and then of course there's people like graph e who do you know stuff over in italy and they're extremely reasonably priced they've got really great prices but they were done in italy and so there's there's a time lag there so it takes a little while to get the book so you definitely have to wait a little while but then you know there are more things coming down the pipe by the way from smart albums that will knock your socks off well so what you just saw which was amazing to you gets better within the next three months well, one thing that's really cools it looks like we have a representative from them in our inner questions oh yeah so they're in there they're answering questions good good that they're field loving more questions we do have a rapidly it seems like I don't ever like to promise because you know you never you know if it's a name that seems very russian it's an a c charles I believe is well not so bright but that's great I hope they get all the answers they want because this is an amazing thing and the biggest question we're getting not only from the chat rooms but again for all of our friends out there who are personal computer pc microsoft users do you have any advice where you could direct them to a piece of software that may not be as great or but might similarly help them build albums? Well, okay, again I mentioned at the beginning, and I'll mention it again. If you don't want to purchase a mac for this process, which you should, I would literally seriously go down and buy a mac mini and this, and it becomes your album production. Uh, person, you know, don't go hire an employee to do it, just hire a mac mini and the and smart albums, and you're in you're in, but if you don't want to do that, if you're against max as a religion or something that's, fine, don't do it, but there are services out there that will design it for you. For instance, kiss wedding books has an online designer that will do it for you there's. If you're working with graff e graph, he has a software specifically designed to build albums for graf e, which is a very in depth software in design, does a great job. Designing for anything and so in design is fantastic, but if you want to go to a professional and have them do it. Then you could just pay them every time you want to make an album, just send it off to them, and they'll do all the work, and then when the client wants changes, you don't have to make it that literally a lion album design, we'll do all the changes for you, so then you don't even have to do your own changes, so you know, there's ways to get rid of the entire thing, and and I can't recommend out a line album design enough, if you want to get rid of that completely off your plate, so if I have an album designed that I don't want to do, and I don't have time to do it, I'll send it to a line and have them do, and they'll do just as beautiful a design, if not better, because they're really finessing it, but I'm just outsourcing that process so and by the y away, anybody who goes toe line, album, design and that's a line is in aligning two photos, they will give you fifty percent off your first book order. If you have your first designed, so awesome question it was, it was just I went to smart albums website last night, I did my homework down downloaded the thirty day I have a pc and a mac, and they actually have download buttons for both however if you click on the pc one it says not available yet so they must be thinking about it I s o it's on the website and it says not available yet then clearly they're working on it but I don't know if I have no idea when that would come about but I will say this if any company can make a piece of software right and do it in a pretty quick fashion it's going to be this one so so you may be in luck for pc awesome I love blurbs new interactive rich media e books so can you use this for things that are e book I saw pdf so you could save the pdf so can you use make a ah andy book that's got say video or so if you wanted to make an e book out of this my suggestion would be do you do the design quickly send it to in design have in design make the book I don't want to use indesign can I don't use it can I can you just can you just use it like this or you can you can export a pdf and then you could pull that into uh a software that would help you make the e book out of the pdf I suppose but I mean you can't you can't import like the other the slide show that you did before the kids no, no it's not going to be there at least not right now I mean, maybe that's something in the future that they'll be working on an e book option where you could put a video in there and then if that's the case you know then obviously that could happen but right now video isn't part of it, but I'll certainly mention to them in fact if they're listening right now, e book options would be very cool so you know, I'm sure they'll think about it if it looks like it's a big enough request, maybe they'll look into it but that'd be cool option so considering a three month old company our three month old product this is spot on so I think we're good to roll good way yeah let's just get questions because we are the way we were then great fantastic. So one of the questions that came in I wanted to read was it's from chio who says hey, jarod, it was great have lunch with you and my wife at mystic thanks for the advice about the color checker I have a question if you want to adjust the images in photo shop and then bring it back to the smart album is that is that what's what's your workflow there just the images? Yeah, so if you add the texture than do then move back into you know I really haven't I've only been playing with the software for a couple of months and I haven't ever really gone to photo shop because I don't do that got it, but I am sure that there is a way to do it and I work full for it. I would suggest that if you have questions about interacting with photo shop that you go directly to smart albums and ask him that or just play and here's the thing guys it if if you want to know how to do something it's great to take a class it's great to learn from me, but there's no there's, no substitute for tinkering, everything I've ever learned and people always ask me, how did you learn so much about light room and so much about workflow and so much about photo so much about this? I tinkered, I've never read a book on any of these things ever. I just tinker, I just tinker and tinker and tinker and end up breaking things, and our favorite thing to do is kids we had this cousin that was older than us like he was when I was maybe eight he was fifteen and he would come over to our house for the summer because he had to work on the ranch with us like his dad would send him to st john's to work on the ranch so he'd come and work on the ranch with us in every afternoon when we get home from the wrench, we would go in and we'd find some piece of equipment or a stereo or something that wasn't working and the mantra was let's take it apart, and so we took everything apart, everything, and so we just tinkered with stuff to figure out how it worked and how you could play, you know what you could do with it and that's, what we do here is when I want to learn how the program works, I will literally have some get it and then I will I will play with it and see what I can do, and then if there's something that I don't understand and it's not working right, then I will contact support or I'll do it web search to see if I'm misinterpreting it or whatever, and usually I'll find, you know, like, oh, it's over in this menu, not in that a menu or something like that were sometimes I find out that they just designed the program wrong. So but tinker, you've gotta tinker that's, how you figure it out so I would suggest try to send it to photo shop to see what you can do to get it back now it once it's in photoshopped to spread and it's not like they're going to import a spread back into smart album. So I think that once you get to photoshopped now, it's time for you to save that and use photo shop or bridge or something to export your j pegs back out or just save those well here, okay? I just I just I just now I've got your answer. That's how quickly I'm gonna come up. Okay, here's. The answer. Do your smart album, take it to photoshopped. Save that photo shop in the same folder as the j pegs so that it's inside of that same system and now goto light room and right click the folder an import, all of the changes. So you're going to save the chain and bring him back into light room, so you're going to import all those psd is backto light room and then have light room. Send out the final j pegs of the spreads. That way you have complete control over it. You see them all together and you can quickly automate a set of images going out awesome that's how.