Before you start album-planning, it helps to understand a few more definitions and concepts.

Layouts, pages, sides, panoramas and apertures…

A LAYOUT is what you see when you browse through an album – the back of one PAGE and the front of another, as in the graphic above. Each page has two SIDES.

On a STANDARD layout each side acts as a separate design area. For example the Centre Align tool places an image in the centre of the side – you cannot place an image across the centre of the layout (the gutter or spine of the book).

On a PANORAMA layout, both sides comprise one design area: now you can place an image across the centre of the layout – in fact the Centre Align tool places an image across the gutter, right in the centre of the layout.

In Photojunction, you add and delete layouts from your album design. You cannot move or delete sides. You can move layouts forward and back in the album by dragging them in the preview Tools palette.

Finally, whenever you see an image on a layout, it appears in an APERTURE. The apertures in matted albums are self-evident (the holes in the card that reveal the print), but un-matted albums have "apertures" as well. Click here for more about matted aperture types.

You don’t necessarily see the entire image in an aperture. Sometimes the aperture doesn’t show the whole image simply because it has a different aspect ratio. Other times you’ll want to zoom in and display just a part of the image, as in the graphic above.

You can add EFFECTS to an Aperture, such as displaying the image greyscale or sepia, changing its opacity or adding a border. These don’t change the image in the aperture – they just tell Photojunction to display an image greyscale or sepia when it’s in this aperture. Swap images and the effects will apply to the new one. For more about apertures see The Image Palette.

We’ll use these words constantly as we discuss album design.

Don’t design albums your vendor can’t make!

A word of caution – Photojunction is powerful enough to design albums from pretty much any album supplier you can name. But because you can DESIGN an album in Photojunction doesn’t mean that your particular vendor can MAKE it. A few obvious examples:

• Your supplier may not offer matted albums.

• Your supplier may not allow you to custom-design matted album layouts.

• Your supplier may not offer Wing or Flip pages.

• Your supplier may limit the number of pages in an album.

• Your supplier may require a certain minimum distance between apertures, or between an aperture and the page edge, in matted albums.

• Your supplier may not allow you to display images inside the front or back covers of the album.

• Your supplier may not allow you to combine certain cover motifs with particular album sizes or materials.

If you’re using Album Resources from your vendor, these may prevent you from making some, but not necessarily all, inappropriate choices.

In other words, you need to be very clear what your supplier can and cannot do, and keep this in mind as you work. This is especially important if you set up the Album Resources yourself.

Photo-safe Guides

Your album supplier has the option of adding Photo-safe Guides to the album layout design area. Broadly speaking these guides are intended to show areas around the edge of the layout and/or down the centre spine that are at risk of being trimmed away or otherwise compromised during the album construction stage (you need to ask your album supplier exactly what the guides signify in their specific case). In general:

• You should extend (or “bleed”) images right to the edge of the layout OR keep them completely inside the Guides.

• Don’t include anything important in the area outside the Photo-safe Guides (eg heads, text): some (maybe all) of it may be trimmed away.

• For the same reason, you shouldn’t include borders on images that extend outside the Photo-safe Guides.

In some cases you may be surprised at how much of the layout lies outside the guides: sometimes as much as 12mm (half an inch). A typical reason is that the layout may be used to produce both the large original album and miniature copies as well. Why is that important? Suppose the final trimming stage of album construction removes 2-3mm from the edge of the layout. In all likelihood the amount removed will be the same regardless of size: in other words you’ll lose 2-3mm from both the little copy and the big album. In addition, you’ll almost certainly use the same design work to produce both the big feature album and (after shrinking the file to maybe a third or a quarter of its original size) the copy album. What that means is that a 2-3mm “photo-safe area” on copy album layouts requires a 9-12mm allowance on the original full-size layout. Result: the vendor needs to set the guides to say 12mm just in case you decide to make those little copies.

We recommend that you do as the professionals do and keep critical parts of the image outside the danger area defined by the guides. If in doubt, speak to your album supplier.

You can hide the Guides if you wish, but we don’t recommend it.

The Photo-safe Guides also appear as non-printing guides on your PSD high-res exports. You can disable this on the Preferences Exports tab if you prefer.

Setting out your windows 

Before you start planning albums it’s worth thinking about how to lay out your windows. Photojunction uses multiple windows because different functions require very different screen layouts. For example:

• Organising your images uses just the Event Window, which is itself very flexible.

• While designing albums you need to see not just the images, but also the current page layout, as well as various layout tools etc.

How you lay out the windows to suit these purposes is a personal preference. You can really spread out if you have two monitors, but with one screen you need to prioritise.

We rather like the layout in the screenshot above, because it keeps the two Tools panes you’ll use most often (the Layout and Image panes) open at the same time, one either side of the Album Layout window. The Event Window occupies a relatively small space at the bottom. You could modify it by closing the Navigation and Preview panels, and/or by adjusting the thumbnail slider. This arrangement makes it very easy to scroll through your images and drag them directly on to the page layout directly above.

A nice touch is that you can click the Event Window’s Maximise button so it occupies the entire screen, then click again to return it to its original size and position. Very handy.

Save your workspace!

Once you’ve decided how you’d like to lay out your screen, select Save Album Planning WorkSpace from the Windows menu and Photojunction will open the album planning windows to this arrangement from now on.

Auto-focus

The various windows involved in album planning have an auto-focus feature, which means that they become active automatically as you roll over them. This makes all functions available even though they’re in different windows. It also means you can conjure up a bit more real estate by overlapping the windows. You can see this if you compare the screen shot just above with the previous one. Previously the Tools window on the left was to the front. We then rolled the mouse over the Album Layout window and on to the Event Window. The Tools window is now partly concealed, but will come to the front and activate as soon as you roll on to it again.