All my wedding photography collections include an album, so you may be wondering how the album design process works.  I just wanted to run through what happens from after the wedding to your final album delivery.  I’ll be showing some images from an album I’m currently working on to illustrate as well – so you’ll get to see my current design style.

Designing The Wedding Album

In the past I tried many different ways to create an album with my couples, and one thing that became apparent very quickly is how intimidating it can be trying to choose images for your album.  For that reason it can take months (or even years!) for couples to get back to me with album choices.  To get your album produced as quick and easy as possible, I ask couples to trust my judgement and let me design their perfect wedding album for them.

After I have created your final image disk I go through the images one last time and really edit them down into what I think is the absolute best set of images from the day.  These are the images I think will look great in the album and that will give a balanced account of what happened on your wedding day.  I don’t work on a “per image” system, but usually there will be around 150 images I use as my main set to work from when creating the album.  I like to keep my designs clean and simple, and usually a 30 page album will have around 80 images, and a 60 page album will have around 130.

Your album package will either have 30, 40 or 60 pages included.  Before designing the album I check with you to see if you’d like me to keep exactly to the number of pages included in your package, or whether you’d like me to design more so you have some to choose from.  Sometimes couples see the extra pages and upgrade so they can have them all, but if you want to make some changes and get the page count back to what’s included in your package the way I do that is pretty simple too.

I use a program called album exposure for you to view and proof your album pages.  As you look through the album you can enter any comments into the box to let me know if you want to keep the page or get rid of it.

As well as deleting pages, you may want to change some of the images to ones you’d prefer instead and this can be done using the comments box as well.  At this first round of revision it’s vital you communicate all the changes you want so I can get to work refining the album so it’s exactly the way you want it.  Most times, only a few changes are needed and the album can be signed off and ordered after this first round.  There is no limit to the number of changes you can send through in this round.

Once the changes are made I upload the revised album for you to proof.  It should now look like your perfect wedding album, but sometimes there are a few small tweaks you want to make.  If you do, a second round of revision is also included in your package price and you can make these changes in the comments box just as before.  I make the changes and upload the album for you to proof again.

These two rounds of revision are included in your package price – any further revisions from this point are charged at £30 per revision.  I’ve never had to do a third round of revision :)

The season will affect how quickly your album can be designed – Winter weddings can be done in a few days, but for August and July weddings it may take a little longer.  The initial designs should be ready within a few weeks of the wedding and when you get back to me with your first round of feedback I can give you an estimate then of when the album might be ready given the number of changes you have requested.