1. How often should I save my Album?
2. How do I open a previously saved Album?
3. Isn't a local design application better than online design?
4. Should the images be placed with their edges meeting your gray
markers or the cut marks?
5. What size or quality of files should I be using?
6. What is your turn around time once an album is submitted until
it is shipped?
7. Can you print scrapbook pages that I've done either in Photoshop
or Photoshop elements?
8. What are the best ways of working with fonts?
1. How often should I save my Album?
You should select the "Save Album" option from either the menu bar or the Album menu every time you make any major changes and are satisfied with the look of those changes.
2. How do I open a previously saved Album?
Open the design tool by selecting any product and then click the Blank Album option. From the Design tool then select the "Album Selector" option from the Album menu. This will display your saved albums. Click on the Album you want to work on and select the "Edit Album" option from the menu bar.
3. Isn't a local design application better than online design?
I'll share a story from one of our users. Kismet wrote: "Our apartment was struck by lightning a few months ago, and we lost our computers and other electronics in the subsequent surge. The hard drive from my old computer is with the Geek Squad at the moment to see if they can recover any of my files." All of her work that was uploaded to PhotoAlbum.com is safe and available she is able to continue working with her online designs from any computer on the internet. Another one of our users writes: "I do like the fact that I can upload the images I want to use, then work on the pages at my leisure wherever I have an internet connection. I did a little playing during a work break yesterday, as a matter of fact."
4. Should the images be placed with their edges meeting your gray markers or should the black corner markers that appear when you move or resize the image be inside the gray corner markers?
Thanks for your note and I will be glad to help you. My first recommendation is to get started building your album and we will be happy to have a look at your layout to make sure it is correct. Also when you press the Order Output button - it will create a PDF file for you to review to help as well.
Some information to be aware of:
The page layouts include a gray area around the edge. This gray area is the "cutting zone" where the printed sheet is cut to final size. Cutting is a physical manual process and is in-exact therefore it is important to include a "bleed" zone around the edge of your design where you extend the background colors through this zone - and also do not include important things like Text into this zone.
Another consideration is the gutter. This is the "inside" edge of pages where it binds in the spine of the book. For odd pages (1,3,5,...) this is the left side and for even numbers it is right side. You should try and keep important items like text about a 1/4th inch away from the gutter for ease in reading.
These are general rules. For the 12 by 12 size you have lots of room and so these are not significant issues to worry about.
More importantly is the very large "bleed" zone for the custom cover for your book. It is very important that your design background cover extend all the way through this zone. It is folded over the book board and needs to include the design colors.
One of the reasons we like to take orders manually is to help make sure that designs are done correctly. We will do our best to help you make a beautiful book.
5. What size or quality of files should I be using? My images are created at 300 DPI and 12x12 in PSCS3 and then saved as a jpeg.
This is perfect! Images should be at least 200 DPI for best quality. Also remember that scaling an image reduces the effective resolution. So it is best create your images to the correct size at 200 DPI or higher.
6. What is your turn around time once an album is submitted until it is shipped?
This sort of depends on the level of work. We are working very hard to keep turnaround time to under 3 days. In many cases turnaround time is just 1 day but we can't promise that.
7. Haven't gone thru every nook and cranny in your website, but trying to figure out if you can print scrapbook pages that I've done either in Photoshop or Photoshop elements. I'd like to have a bunch of pages bound in a hardback 12x12 book. Can you do this?
Yes Certainly! Our online design tool works with all popular open file formats, so just save your pages in PNG, TIFF, JPEG for instance. When you first open the design tool you should select the PhotoAlbum product type and then click on the Large Square Photoalbum, this is the 12by12 size.
Then you can click on the Blank Album button to open a blank page.
Drag and Drop your images onto the pages and position them to expand out to the cropping marks. You can use the Center option on the Page Objects panel to help center you art on the page.
Add additional pages by pressing the "+" add pages button down in the bottom left corner.
8. What are the best ways of working with fonts? Can I just include them in my page image files?
This is fine and I'm sure you will be happy with the results. However if you did not include your fonts in the images - but instead used the design tool to create your text blocks then they will output at a higher quality when printed giving them very crisp and sharp edges. We are the only online design tool that supports this capability so a lot of people are not aware of it. If you set fonts using PhotoShop then these fonts are rendered into the image and you will anti-aliase them which makes the font edges soft - looks specially bad on small type. But if you set the fonts using the design tool then they are rendered at the 1200 DPI of the printing press and it looks much nicer.