This palette provides tools for managing your IMAGES and the APERTURES they’re contained in.

Images, apertures and aperture type

We won't repeat here what we said earlier about the difference between Apertures and the Images they contain. But we do need to reinforce that, for a number of reasons, you don’t normally see the entire image in the aperture:

• Sometimes the aperture and image simply have different ASPECT RATIOS (ratio of height to width), which means the image will be cropped in the aperture.

• Sometimes you simply want to ZOOM IN and display just a part of the image (more about that shortly).

• In a matted album, part of the printed image is normally (but not always) concealed behind the card mat.

Photojunction represents what you can and what you can't see accurately. For example, what you see on screen when you're designing an overlay album is what will be visible in the finished product. You will not see that part of the image that will be concealed behind the mat (assuming your vendor has supplied accurate information in the resources!)

Keyline effects 

Some manufacturers offer more complicated aperture types to provide various keyline or framing effects around apertures. Click here for the matted aperture types that Photojunction recognises (overlay, pagemount, double-matted and bevel-edged).

Within the limitations of the supplier's resources, Photojunction also represents these keyline effects on screen, to give you the closest possible idea what the finished album will look like.

Key points to understand

• In matted albums, the size of the image ALWAYS differs from the size of the aperture. Generally  it’s slightly larger – so the edge of the finished print is concealed behind the mat – but in pagemount apertures the print is slightly smaller – to expose the base page and create the keyline effect.

• In digital albums, of course, the print covers the entire page layout, so image and aperture size can be, and are, the same.

• You can't directly change the size of an IMAGE on the layout. Instead, you change the size of the APERTURE, and Photojunction changes the size of the image to suit.

crop/zoom

When you add an image to the Album Planning screen Photojunction detects whether it has a vertical or horizontal aspect ratio, adds it to the layout using the same aperture size you were working on previously and "zooms out" to show as much of the image as possible.

The Crop / Zoom slider allows you to zoom in if you want to. You can also:

• Move the crop with the mouse to frame the image the way you want it.

• Change the crop by dragging the corner of the framed area (instead of using the slider).

APERTURE DETAILS

The left drop-down box shows the default aperture type, as set for this album by the Page Type you selected. In some cases your supplier may allow you to change this, aperture by aperture, to another type, although we recommend doing so with caution.

The current aperture size is displayed to the right of the aperture type. You can make a new selection from the list on offer.

The size of the aperture as it is displayed in the aperture list is APPROXIMATE – hence the tilde (“~”) before the size label. You can read the precise dimensions of both the current image and the current aperture just below the drop-down menus.

Depending once again on the options allowed by your album supplier you may also be able to create a custom aperture size. You can do so...

• By dragging directly on the corner of the aperture (constrain proportions by holding down the Shift key).

• By using the arrow buttons on the Image palette (or by entering the dimensions directly in the Aperture Size fields); keep the Contrain Proportions box checked to maintain the aspect ratio.

Orientation

You can change the aspect ratio of the aperture from vertical or horizontal, or vice versa, change the aperture from rectangular to oval, or flip the image in the aperture vertically or horizontally.

effects

Here you can add special effects (Greyscale or Sepia) to the selected image at the click of a button, as well as change its opacity. Clicking Greyscale or Sepia again undoes the transformation. You can apply both Greyscale and Sepia to the same image at the same time.

When you create your high-res export files using the Photoshop scripting option, the special effects you apply will be added as separate adjustment layers, leaving the pixel data in your original file untouched. 

With an aperture selected you can click the Copy button to copy the effects you've applied to it (including borders - next section), then select other apertures and click Paste to apply them to the images in the new apertures.

Border

Enables you to add simple borders (strokes) to images in digital (un-matted) albums. You can specify the width of the border in tenths of a millimetre as well as the colour.

Image Editor Functions

Open in Editor enables you to open the selected image in the image editor of your choice, as set up in Preferences. . You can modify the original file, or make a copy and modify that. When you’ve finished Photojunction will update the images in the Event accordingly.

Photoshop Actions enables you to call your installed Photoshop actions from within Photojunction. Photojunction will run the action on the proxy image and then repeat it on when you export the high-res outputs for printing.