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Intro to Apple Aperture Book Design

We're going to talk all about doing albums in actor and I think the great thing about albums and actor is that it's something that not really any other softwares that do all the other things that after does has integrated a book designed tool in it and it's so powerful but people really have no idea the capabilities that it has so I wanted to start by sharing with you guys some albums from our studio that we designed in apter so they even see what a finished product looks like andi I get to like touch and feel the album so I'm going to show you guys the album here this is just one of them this one was done on glad there with a glass cover this albums from funny oh you can see the the glass here and then the photos underneath this album is from video and they do beautiful albums I love love their covers they've really really unique cool covers and this layout was all done in after we exported the photos out santa montevideo and then finney oh did the book designed for us and show you ki...

nd of the middle section here so you can see that on dh then you can also see all the different like covers and options that that the album has so this's the leather it's really cool this is like more of a kind of tattoo feel to it that's really neat and it's nice to see you the spine is kind of see what what is is capable so that's one of them let me show you another one this one is one that was done with from qatar book so the couture book album I love this one because you can just I don't know it's interactive like the way that you pull the leather out this one was done for rebecca and giant they are the couple that is featured in most of the apple store seem I recognize some of these images there see these images and on getting thes images here they did an indian wedding uh but they did a multicultural wedding because she clearly is not indian but he waas so they had a beautiful hindu ceremony so this book was done on as you noticed like thinner pages so you khun doom or images in an album this way we still did the nice leather cover this is a duplicate of the clients album has her sister crying she's so sweet so we did a duplicate of the parents alba are the couple's album for this they had all these images in here this is for my clients who don't want to part with a lot of their images on dh oh that was a funny one of giant he's so sweet so you kind of see how that looks so we did all of this design in in aperture and it was so nice and easy. I love these books because there's so many images in them, but it's so nice that you can do the design so quickly and easily, and then do the retouching and all that, um, quickly and easily as well. That's, rebecca and giant. And then I brought you one more to look at. This one here was affinity is a neo album, a cz well, this is so the one in the middle was couture that's, the thinner pages. And then the first one was funny. Oh, this is the second one. This is their envelope, so it has the envelope on it basically. And then the album's inside it's going to flip it over here so you can see it just kind of slipped out of the envelope and then they have the case separately so they can keep the case and keep their album save which I think is really nice. And then this is the truffle weather. I love this weather you have may not be able to see it, but it's raised. So you, khun, you can really feel and see the texture this's one of the covers that we use the most this is an armoire cover it's, a photo that is laminated and mounted to meddle um and that looks really, really nice right there I did a really tight shot for this cover because I just I love the details and stuff that come into the albums this is are like medium size album so this one's a little bit on the smaller side is a little bit easier to handle our couples love this size to really love this size so let me show you a few of the page spreads and on the inside on her eyes stunning oh my gosh you know she's beautiful and so is her mother that's her mother yes that's her mother e I know crazy and then her her sisters, the groom and his groomsmen we did a first look for them so this is their this is their first look he did in this cool library there huge disney fan so I felt I felt like this whole shoot was very just ethereal and I had just a really cool feel to it and it doesn't hurt to have a good looking couple who are so in love so we headed onto the beach so just to talk about the layouts that you're seeing a little bit you'll see this in the design but we do a lot of things that will like come right to the centre of the page I like really clean simple designs you won't see really stuff like backgrounds or a lot of text or um things like that I love designs that will really stand the test of time they can look back at this in ten years and see the images and not see the design and what when that wass and that's one of the reasons that you know, I talk so much about keeping images classic and not getting too into aa lot of the just crazy textures or things that may be out of date in five or ten years because the couple wants to be able to look back on their album and love it I'm always and not be like, oh my gosh, that's so seventies the only thing that should date your album is the hairstyles and that's usually what happens e I had one couple of the group had a really crazy here sound I'm like the only thing that will get your album is your hairstyle uh, but these are the types of designs I like. I like minimalist designs I like things that lay out, but there's really, really focus on the images and give the best design and layout possible to bring really the focus to the image. So when we're doing the designs today and when I go through all of this, I want you guys to think about that when I'm doing the layout and the spacing and on dh why I'm doing it you also see images like this that will bleed across the center because of this type of album design and you do need to think about what book you're going into sometimes you'll get a crease or a cut in the middle here with different album companies, but most album companies these days have something like this are very very similar where you khun spread across two pages so a lot of our designs will do that. However, if you don't have if you don't have like this nice spread in the middle and in yours will crease in the middle you can just change and adjust the designs for that teo that's fine so designs like this would be fine, obviously, but you wouldn't want to stay away from designs spread of past two pages or just switch album companies that fine as well to something that gives you the capabilities to do this on these air in our syllabus and the resource guide if you guys want to check out couture book was the thin page this is often a oh albums for new albums does thes beautiful albums that did it they did a lantern release as well very disney but just so you guys know these things are scary it was like releasing giant balls of fire in the sky was crazy I was pretend it is just a romantic is it looks but it definitely was a little scary and you can see this is the texture of of the leather so cool that they have a ton of different options like so many that is it can be overwhelming for clients, but I just I usually suggest which leathers for the client based on their personality on who they on who they are and then and what kind of style that I think that they would go for and then they can kind of go from there so I feel like I should vanna white thiss thank you it's beautiful. So those air some albums and that's basically what we are creating today, which is going to be so much fun to see kind of the finished product at the end before you even get started, which is great and if you guys have any questions about the album companies about the album specifically just jump in any time I'm gonna kind of dive into how to do the albums and then we can kind of flush out any questions that we have unless we have anything to start with disa curious question about about how what percentage of your clients are going for albums are pretty much a hundred percent across the board um so there's we've three shooters, so it depends on which one of this which one of you us you're talking about my clients are about ninety percent of my clients two albums jessica and rachel's clients typically they're more and like the sixty percent of clients or doing albums so it just depends there really on what they can afford if if they can afford that or not erin looms air so important and we really really stressed that in our studio so but I'm still training jessica and rachel on helping their clients kind of work through that as well just financially they want everybody wants an album it's just a matter of if they can if they can afford it right fantastic andi I want to let everybody in the chat rooms no, we will gather those links of the the company's a little bit later today and make sure we post them in the chat room great now the awesome okay, so I'm going to go ahead and jump right in we've been working with the same engagement throughout the whole process with david and morgan, so I figured I would just go ahead and start with them. I have another aperture library up currently so it's just asking me if I want to switch to this one and I'll just tell it that we do and then we can start right away working on an album and I think I'm I I send a launch it from down here perfect okay so when I start working on this album actually let me just pull the one from the drive I was playing with last night I want to make sure I had some good semi adjusted images for you guys, so I went through last night and just kind of did some base adjustments on the sample pack of images, so we have something to play with so that we could work on those as your engagement template. There is your engagement album, we do engagement albums for couples all the time, that's, a really popular product and the engagement albums are really easy and simple to do, especially when you have a template to kind of go off. So I am going to show you kind of the template that I just pulled in last night. I can't give you an overview of how it looks and what I was able to kind of throw together in a few minutes, and then I'll show you guys specifically how to do this is, well, this design is a little bit different than our full wedding album designs, because this has a room and space for people to write, so they wantto put this out and have people write notes and say, oh, you know, congratulations instead of having a sign in book, so that's, why? So we put a we start off with their cover image so that they see that choice right away, and we aren't duplicating it in the album. And then right below that is the first page so we start off with the first page and then this would be the look of the first page of court of course we can add text and all that different stuff on dh I'll go through the details of how to build it in a second but I just want to give you guys a little preview if you hit I you can get rid of the inspector had so you can see just the album design you're working on this one I left a lot of space for people to write notes on and then we did as spread here to go across the page this's kind of fun to see them on the skateboard I don't think we rode played with those images much and then their night video shots and then the last page there so that's a really simple design it came out to about twelve besides, you may need a minimum of twenty sides for a number but since we only had fifteen images in the sample packages did a quick kind of lay out for you guys so I want to start by giving you a little tour of the design software but before we even do that I want to just show you how to import a template or to start a brand new album so if you're going to import one of our temple it's the engagement wedding or engagement wedding was one more what was it? I don't know well oh we have to wedding template so we have a horizontal and we have a square on guy should talk about this for a second when you first start working on your album the most important thing is to know what shape you want it don't you don't have to know which size you wanted to end up as but if you want a square design you need to start from a square design you can't go in and adjust the size or the shape of the album in after the fact you can go down in size as long as the shape stays the same but you can't ever go up in size if you started it too small so we always oversize it make it bigger than you would expect and you I'm also can't change the shape so if you decide to start with square and then the kinds like oh I really love the horizontal lay out you have to start all over so you definitely want to figure that out ahead of time I usually I do a lot of horizontal albums but I'll usually find out from the client if they have a preference one way or the other if they don't I'll decide for them but square images are really great for a good mix of like verticals and horizontal tze horizontal album just lays out really pretty both of the ones from female that has showed were horizontal, and they just feel like you could get those good, like, horizontal panoramic images, spread it across two pages really well, but I love this square, too, so it really we include them both, we use them both, and the album templates come in looking like this, so they basically just look like an aperture library, and they are they are basically just aperture libraries, so there is two ways to get them into your apter library. The easiest way, I think, is just to pick the pick it up and drop it off in the aperture library they working on so you can just drag it over and just drop it off once you see the plus button is importing it now, it's actually merging it together so it's merging those two libraries together, and I'm told you would talk about that yesterday, so we're definitely going toe talk a little bit about emerging libraries later on today, and then your album temple. It will just show up in here, and you can just go straight from that album template and and start designing so yours will be blank and you'll have here, let me just I think I'll do anyone when we do the wedding ones as well, but you yours only blank, and you can just start pulling images in and changing designs. So that's one way to get an album temple, it started the other way. I mean, just go to the event are going toe the sample pack of images because those are the ones we're going to use on dh, then I want to go to new and book. This is also something that would be good to have a shortcut key for if you're using aperture to dio your book designs frequently, so if you click on book, you'll get a pop up window and I'll talk you through the different options that you have here. Okay, on the left hand side. Oh, it's my couple, this is one of the one of my couples from years ago. Every once in a while, I run across images that I shot that apple still uses, which is socal, so they give you all of these options along the side, but all of these options are to purchased the rue apple, so these you can see what these books kind of look like. They're hard cover with a with a rap, basically around them, a loose rap and the photos are on thin paper, they're really inexpensive. You can do it, I think, for twenty thirty, forty bucks just depending on sizing and they have some you know cool lay out this is not if I'm doing it album designed for a client though this is a consumer product so if you can if anyone can get it these are the same as like I photo books, eh? So if anyone can get it I definitely don't want to try and sell it as a professional product and but it is really great if you just want to create something for yourself for your family although I love to get my family really nice albums as well like I want them to have the professional products as well I mean I can write who else could do that? S o that's really great and then you have the option at the top to choose which size so if you were, say, doing a book from your vacation maybe it's the art collection you khun say which size that one are you gonna want an extra large size large medium small also if you hit this button here it will take you to the internet and it will give you all of the options and prices just to tell you what sizing that is and tell you all the pricing and stuff so that's really good if you want to do a consumer book but that's not what we're going to do today so there are a couple other things I want to point out there is a non apple books learn more button that will take you to the apple web site, and it will tell you about the plug ins that they have available. The plug ins go to four different album companies. There is a qatar book, which is this one that we showed qatar back as a plug in. You see that from here? Yeah. So this is a controller book, the thin one I had been there pages, they have a ton of really cool covers, they're great company and they're plugging is really great as well, so you can use the plug in to go to qatar book on, do a design with them there's also phon e o r sorry, not female for now does not have a, um a plug in there's queen's, very graphic studios and leather craftsman. So those air before all great companies all have fantastic products, all great choices for apple and they I'll have plug ins for aperture, so we do individual plug in trainings because of our time constraint and all of your independent knees. If you're interested in one of the plug ins, you can go straight to my shop site and you can get the plug in trainings there they don't go through every single step with that specific plug in, but we definitely don't have time to run through all those today, so I'm going to talk about custom, which will allow you to go to any independent company I actually use custom even to go to mature because I want the flexibility to order through qatar or if the parents decide they want an album as well, I want to be able to do it, you know, for nao smaller album for them, if I want tio or I can also send it through to qatar, or if I want to as well. So I I like the flexibility and custom ization of using custom, but if leather craftsman's your company and you use them all the time, it's really great to be able to use their plug in and go straight to the company because it will literally wrap those images up, send him straight, tio the company that you're working with and nelson do a book back so that exporting process and all of that just become so much easier because you actually order and export all through the plug in. Okay, next is customs so that's the one that we are going to be working in now that you know all of the different options that are out there let's talk about the one that we're going to be working with if you hit custom, you'll most likely get this, which is nothing on the side of here, and you can you can do a new theme, which is what we're going to do, and this is asking you what you want your book to be titled, we'll just put it, put it down as david and morgan engagement and then let's hit new theme, and I'll show you how to create your sizing. So in the beginning of doing albums with this book tool, I used to come in here and I'd be like, oh, I want an eight by eight and then I make an eight by eight and then I realized this took me awhile, so please learn from my mistake. I realized that when I made an eight by eight, if the client decide they want to upgrade to a ten by ten, I was host, I had to start the design all over, so I scratch that idea and I started to figure out that if I just did a square design I could make is large as they possibly order and I can always down size, but I can't up size, so I I decide to do square in a fourteen by fourteen size, which is the largest size that ponyo does. In square so that's the largest size I can order larger size my clients would want to order so it in fourteen by fourteen for the square and then with image spacing this is this I clear out to make zero I want complete control my image spacing I want complete control of where put images, so I'm going to leave that for zero and then under margins these margins are actually borders that go around the edge of the page so each independent page there's a there's a couple ways to think about this but the easiest thing to do is clear all of these out I'm down to zero because what happens is when you go and export your images you did this beautiful design it's perfect and then all of sudden it has a box around it, so it's got a border around the outside what what they were intending this for is for designed where they need to cut down the pages so margins basically some album while all album companies have a certain area of bleed where they're able to trim those designs down. So if you want to include some sort of margin, my only suggestion is leave inside at zero always so this would be your top this would be your bottom this would be your outside and as long as this is set to zero, you won't have borders on the inside pieces so for some album companies just to kind of talk you through that for a second album companies will show you where your bleeds going to be so if you I say they're doing a design like thiss actually would be more for today I'll show you that one be more for design like thiss because what they do is they sand down the pages after they make him so they basically the laminated photo to each individual page here they laminate this photo down and then once they have all of that done and the binding done they still haven't done the cover they take that whole thing and they put it in a sander and they sand them all down evenly to give this beautiful finish look well that's really great but in that process you lose a little bit of your image top outside and bottom so they'll give you basically a safe area they'll say you know this amount is how much you could lose and that's the tricky question is are the turkey part is really that you could lose that much but will you is the question so if you put a margin in here and they sand it down but they don't sand it down as much as you think they will then you still end up with the white border here not as much of a border here and more of a border at the bottom I mean that doesn't look good, right? So I say leave us all the zero go full bleed just in case and then just no on your photos that you're going to lose a little bit here a little bit here and a little bit there but at least if it's a little uneven no one will notice so that's really important in your design process and it's really important when you first set up your books so we're going to leave those all to zero and hit ok if at the same time and then I can rename this as well so that I would know what it is next time I come in at the same time you can set up any new themes that you want so the same goes for our horizontal theme are horizontal theme is set up let me do fema set up for the largest horizontal size um and I believe it's twelve by eighteen but eighteen would be wide because it's horizontal and twelve would be the height so this depends a little bit on your album company as well for neo actually has a chart that shows you if you do this size you can do this this this and this size as well, so we chose the size that size down the best so it goes from this to like a ten by fifteen and then from a ten by fifteen to I think eight by twelve and then six by nine don't quote me on these, by the way, five by seven something so they signed down a ton and I can get a ton of difference sizes, which is great because I designed basically the largest size the couple may end up choosing an eight by twelve they may end up choosing a ten by fifteen, but then if the parents decide they want to do book a version, I can still dio five by seven or six by nine something that's more size to them specifically, so having those overall encompassing designs is something that took me years to figure out. It shouldn't have, but it did, and I hope that saves you a lot of time and effort and headache. I'm just going to name these so we remember what they are and the's khun b, you're templates to choose from, however, I'll show you basically what they do do you want? I'll show you square because we're going to do horizontal in the actual design, so I'll show you what that is, what that looks like and when it comes in looking like so when you pull in a custom design, it has no idea what lay outs you want. Because you just created a size based out of nothing, there aren't like, you know, one hundred people back going, oh, she wants a square, you do a bunch of layout, you know, so they just basically give you a one up, three up, two up. You know, right together all these different layouts, and you have to really design the whole thing from scratch, which is fine. It's, really easy to dio the templates that we created for you, basically have those designs already created. So we've done the work of doing the layouts and options for you, and let me show you a couple things about and the complete overview of the album design software.