Wedding album design from your digital photographs
Your photographer delivered a gallery link. I turn it into a wedding album you can hold, printed and bound in Italy or the UK. You send the files; I do everything else.
Wedding albums from £292.00, most couples spend £600.00 to £900.00
Any photographer's files
JPEG, a gallery link or a shared drive. I accept whatever you were given and will tell you honestly if resolution is a problem. RAW files are welcome too, though processing them is additional work and is quoted separately.
Design itemised, not hidden
Every quote separates the album from the design labour, exactly as on the pricing page: the album line covers the book itself, and design (the edit, the layout, the first two rounds of amends) is itemised by the hour alongside it. Nothing is bundled into the album price. Amends beyond the second round are quoted separately before I do the work.
Six to eight weeks
Typically two weeks to design and proof, then four to six weeks with the maker in Italy. UK-made softback books are quicker. Rush work is often possible if you tell me the date early, at a premium.
Somewhere over the last decade the album stopped being part of the standard wedding package. Digital delivery replaced it, and a great many couples now have eight hundred photographs on a drive or in a gallery that will eventually expire, and nothing on a shelf. That is not anybody's fault: designing an album properly is a specialist job that takes days rather than hours, and most photographers would rather be photographing.
This is that job. I design, proof and print wedding albums from digital files, whoever took them and however long ago. You do not need to have booked me as your photographer. It is worth checking what you signed with them first: most contracts include a rights release covering personal printing, and I have yet to see one that forbids it, but it is a two-minute check that saves any awkwardness later.
What the design actually involves
The edit is the work. Eight hundred photographs is an archive; sixty in a considered order is a story with a beginning, a middle and an ending. I select, sequence and lay out every spread, deciding what each one is about and removing everything that is not about that.
Twenty years of photographing weddings means I know what the day looks like from behind the camera: which frames are load-bearing, which are filler, and where a wide quiet moment needs to sit so that the busy pages either side of it work. A decade in pre-press means every file is prepared for the specific paper and press it is going onto, because there is no press proof and no second attempt.
You approve it before anything is printed
You see the full album as a proof and can change anything: different photographs, a new sequence, layout adjustments, cover material, foil, the text on the spine. Nothing goes to the press until you are happy with every spread.
Parent copies and second editions
Once the album is designed, further copies cost less than the first, because the design work is already done and only the printing and binding are charged again. How much less depends on the album: a soft back copy is a great deal cheaper, while a second flush-mount album in the same size is a more modest saving. Most couples order a main album and two copies for parents. Those are commonly a smaller version of the same album, in a lighter binding and without the presentation box, which keeps the total sensible without changing the contents.
Albums I would suggest
Further reading
Tell me what you have, and what you would like made
Send me the photographs and a sentence about the occasion. I will come back with a recommendation and a price, with no obligation.