Old Dog, New Trick

The photo businesses (DWP and Lightsmith Imaging) are both going gangbusters. In fact, it's getting harder and harder to find the time to work on my ever-increasing crush of unfinished customer projects. I have been trying to streamline my workflow wherever possible. Sometimes small changes can make a big difference.

Post-processing of images represents probably my biggest time black-hole, so I am always looking for new and better software to help me out. Lightroom has really sped up my processing compared to having to pop every picture into Photoshop. In fact, I probably process 90% of my photos entirely in Lightroom now, only going into Photoshop for the big edits. I can process 800 photos from a wedding in an hour or so now, something that used to take a day. Upgrading my storage system to a single Drobo capable of 16TB also helped as I don't have to constantly move files around in an ever-expanding galaxy of hard drives.

One particular challenge has eluded me until now. Designing wedding albums and other large projects with complicated layouts. I have tried all kinds of different ways to speed up these jobs up but I always went back to Photoshop, which does a fantastic job but requires boatloads of time to create each page.

But recently I have switched over to using a publishing program called Adobe InDesign, the same software used to create magazine and book layouts all over the world. Funny that I never considered trying that software before, looking at the similarities between wedding albums and magazine layouts. But I tried it this week after watching a video online that showed a photographer creating an album with it. And I'm so glad I did because it works fantastically. I only had to use the demo for one project before I was hooked. I bought it the same day. Creating album layouts with InDesign is a fast, accurate, creative process. And the whole wedding album can be in one file. Photos are linked back to Photoshop so you can go back for changes, which auto-update back into InDesign. It just...works.

This approach already easily cuts album design in half for me, and that's counting the learning curve, it will be even faster when I master the program. It's like a light went on. Huge, huge difference in efficiency. Worth every penny.

Here's an example...a fragment of a tutorial for applying rounded corners to a photo in Photoshop. It really illustrates the difference in these two programs when doing page layouts:

"Ever want to make your photos or drawings more elegant-looking by having rounded corners? Here's how to do it in 12 easy steps..."

Twelve steps! It's a one-step process in InDesign and you can apply it to the whole project all at once if you like.

So I learned something this week. And yet, the search goes on for better and faster ways of doing things...I'm thinking of trying out a track ball as a replacement for my mouse because I can't find a mouse that really works well for me.