For families on a budget, large, framed wall prints may be out of their price range. At the same time, relatively inexpensive canvas gallery wraps are becoming more popular. That’s why we offer special pricing on Cluster Gallery Wraps in ROES.

With a little advanced planning you can offer your customers a modern alternative to large framed prints that looks great in any size room, and that you can retail them for almost the same amount as a single large print.

The trick is this: when taking a photograph, instead of thinking of an image as a horizontal or a vertical, think of it as a panorama.

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It is easy to create great album covers in ROES if you follow these directions:

1. Decide which of our albums you are going to create: Diamond, Emerald, Sapphire, a hard cover photo book, or a soft cover photo book. Each of these types of albums have different sets of layout guides that you’ll need to use.

2. Download and save the ROES Layout Guides .ZIP file for the type of album you’ll be creating.

3. Open the .ZIP file, and select the .PSD file for the size and cover of the album you’ll be creating.

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At some point in your life as a professional photographer, you’ll hear the sage advice, “your image should tell a story.” While that may be true, not all stories are the same.

At the most surface level, good images show emotion: happiness, sadness, love, anger or fear. Like a story, emotions caught on camera can resonate with the viewer. But unlike a true story, emotions in an image can be flat. Imagine a portrait of a happy family standing together outdoors. Yes, they are happy, but what else? Happy isn’t always interesting (although it often pays the bills).

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JD’s Custom Album Design Service makes it affordable for you to outsource the entire process of creating a professional wedding album.

Here are some sample wedding album designs. Note that each design will be unique for each client.

View a Sample Wedding Album

To use this service, drop your images in the JD image drop box or send us a CD/DVD. Be sure to include your album choice and number of pages in the drop box instructions. A rule of thumb is to send 3 images per side, plus an extra 10 images. For example, if you wanted a 20 page album, you would send 40 sides x 3 = 120+10 = 130 images.

In about 7 days you will receive an email with a private link for you to review your album. You can type any changes, or agree to the final design.

Price is $199 for any album 20-40 sides. Album cost is not included in the design price.

Have you checked out our layout guides for ROES yet? These collections of layered PhotoShop PSD files make it easy to lay out a product, save as a JPG image, and drop into our ROES software. And because each layout guide comes with safe, wrap and cut guide lines, you can be assured your finished products will look great.

Here are a current list of available guide collections you can download. Each collection of guides are in a ZIP file. You should download the ZIP file and open it to access the PSD files.

• Diamond Albums – our Diamond Album cover guides in leather and acrylic available in 5×5″ through 12×24″ album sizes.

• Emerald Albums – Cover layout guides for Emerald Albums in 5×5″, 6×6″, 8×8″ and 10×10″ sizes.

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(c) 2010, Harry Taylor

The trade shows are over, you’ve got your marketing ready for spring, and suddenly you notice you have a little more time on your hands than normal.

Welcome to March.

Sure, you could use this opportunity to get your taxes done early (yuck) or clean out the back closet at the studio (double-yuck). But why not take the next few weeks and play with photography a bit. After all, wasn’t the “fun” of photography at least part of the reason you bought your first camera?

Below are 8 interesting ways to produce an image you would never do in your normal business. Click the links, and see if any of them look like a fun way to waste a couple of afternoons before spring arrives. Don’t worry about showing anyone your results. And who knows – you might even pick up a new and unique product to wow your clients!

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MyDigitalProductsOnline.com is an “unbranded” website hosted by JD that displays all the press-printed graphic layouts available in ROES.

Since JD is never mentioned anywhere on the site, you can show the My Digital Products Online website to clients at your studio, or you can call a client and have them pick a card style while you’re on the phone

Use it to quickly view all our card styles at a single place:

• Graduations, Weddings, Holidays, Announcements
• Dozens of horizontal and vertical card styles
• Folding cards include optional sentiments
• Always adding more

If you use ROES, bookmark MyDigitalProductsOnline.com and check back often. New card designs are constantly being added.

An all day workshop with Master Artist Kathy Falls

Class size is limited. Reservations must be made by May 30th!
Call JD Photo Imaging at 888-858-8084 today to guarantee your place.

Offered for the FIRST time you will have in in-depth, hands-on workshop that will teach you how to embellish your inkjet canvas and water color fine art pieces. Kathy will take you to the next level showing the latest techniques for creating ‘embellished giclees’ (enhancing your inkjet canvas image with painting techniques).   You will learn these  techniques using pastel paper, exotic papers, water color paper, and inkjet canvas.

This will be a hands-on learning experience using fine art products with painting and drawing applications. You will not be working with a computer, this will be painting directly on the finished image. Kathy will show you the appropriate materials to use for each substrate and how to finish them that will preserve the artwork and the image.

At the end of the day, you will take home two 11×14″ inkjet canvas and one watercolor image that will be artistically painted by you! Kathy will provide the images that you will embellish, a $115 value!

Kathy has utilized these techniques and has had her work in many galleries in Michigan and Indiana. Most recently Kathy was awarded “Best of Show” in the 2010 Hillsdale County annual juried art show for an embellished giclee, and one Loan Print in the Professional Photographers of America 2010 International Print Competition, which she created using these techniques.

Details:

The workshop will be held on Monday, June 6 from 9 am. to 4 pm.

Registration begins at 8:30 am. Please be on time.

Lunch is included.

Cost of the workshop is $120, and will be held at JD Photo Imaging in Flint, Mi.

All materials will be provided. Class size is limited.

Kathy Falls is a Master Photographer, Master Artist, Master Electronic Imaging, Photographic Craftsman, PPA Certified Photographer, Certified E.I., Certified Photographic Specialist

A couple of times a year a customer will call and say “my computer died. I installed ROES/LabPrints on my new PC, but how do I get my work back?”

There are actually three answers to this question: how to backup ROES, how to backup LabPrints, and how to backup your images.

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I’m going to make a bold statement: put two 5×7 prints of the same image in front of a high school senior – one from a pro lab and one from a big-box store – and ask them to tell you the difference. Chances are, they cannot. To them, a print is a print, and the only difference is the price. It’s like buying milk at the grocery store.

No matter how good we get at providing you with professional color, paper, “green” finishes, and convenient ordering, at the end of the day these are only incremental improvements to the products you offer your clients.

The difference between a $2 store print and a $50 print from a studio has to come from you. The fancy marketing term for this is “product differentiation.” It is the thing that makes what you offer different from both a commodity (like a snapshot) and from your competition.

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