ProAlbum-Designer

1. About ProAlbum-Designer

ProAlbum-Designer is a set of actions with Javascript code for Adobe Photoshop® that enables you to design photo books in a quick and efficient manner.

This manual describes version 1 of ProAlbum-Designer and all other versions 1.x that might appear later to fix potential bugs.

2. System requirements

Note: if you are using Windows Vista or Win 7 you must first right-click on the Photoshop icon and select Run as administrator before you run the installation script (as described below). You only need to run as administrator during the installation process.

This manual and distribution is intended for Adobe Photoshop CS3, CS4 and CS5. It doesn't matter whether you are using Mac OS X, Windows XP, Vista or Win 7. You need to have a certain amount of Photoshop experience since the whole point of ProAlbum-Designer is that all of the Photoshop commands are available at any time during the layout process.

After ordering ProAlbum-Designer, you should have a zip file with the current version. Make sure the zip file is unpacked before you proceed. We will refer to this folder as your ProAlbum-Designer folder. Your ProAlbum-Designer folder should contain a small number of jsx files and look something like the screendump on the right.

The rest of the installation takes place from within Photoshop.

3. Launching the install program

Everything related to installation is handled by one script: install.jsx

You will be presented with the following screen:

3.1 Uninstalling previous versions

Before you install this version of ProAlbum-Designer you may want to uninstall previous versions if you have been beta-testing previous versions of ProAlbum-Designer. You are not required to do this, it is only for cosmetic reasons: your Bridge menu will not have two menu options to add images and there will be fewer scripts in Photoshop’s File > Scripts menu.

3.2 Getting the activation code

For security reasons you first need to register your copy of ProAlbum-Designer in order to obtain an activation code: simply email me the Signature (8 character, use copy & paste) and I will reply with your activation code as soon as I can. You can click on Stop and re-run the script later when you receive your activation code.

If you move to a new machine or update Photoshop, you need to register again to obtain a new activation code. It doesn’t cost anything and I will be happy to help you.

Once you have received your activation code you can continue with the installation by clicking on the Install button.

You will be asked to enter your activation code, as shown on the left.

After a few seconds, and if everything goes well, the window below should appear.

If there are any error messages, please review them and contact me if you don’t understand them. If you can, include a screen dump or tell me exactly what the error message was. You can run install.jsx as many times as you want.

If all goes well, the install program copied all the scripts to Photoshop’s script folder. It also generated an action file for your system and stored it in your ProAlbum-Designer folder.

Before you load the action file you need to restart both Photoshop and Bridge. When you start Bridge again, it may ask you if you want to activate the scripts - answer “Yes”.

You can then load the action file, either by double clicking it, or, if that doesn’t work, go to the Actions Palette, open its fly-out menu, choose Load Actions and navigate to the action file. Finally, choose Button mode in the same fly-out menu and you should have a set of colorful buttons like at the top of this document.

Congratulations, you have now successfully installed ProAlbum-Designer - now let's start using it!

5. Book spreads

A book is produced one spread at a time. A spread is a double page. The book printer (QT, Saal, Eirikuva) prints books in many different formats (15x15, 20x20, etc) and there are functions to create blank spreads for each type of book. You can of course also start with your own blank document, for instance a 10x15 cm 300 dpi thank-you card.

Please note that if you have used PBD/BBD, with ProAlbum-designer you do not need to make the first left page and last right page blank. In other words, a 26 page book consists of 13 complete spreads.

Create a blank spread by clicking on New spread. ProAlbum-Designer will generate a blank spread for the book that you have specified in your Preference setting (more on Preference settings later). To simplify the layout process I would recommend that you work in fullscreen mode: tap the F-button until the window frames disappear. In fullscreen mode it is considerably easier to handle the control points that Photoshop places around objects when they are being transformed.

On a blank page spread, guidelines are used to show where the gutter is as well as the bleed allowance. Please take care in not placing something “interesting” along or beyond the outer guidelines. Either keep a safe distance from the bleed or let the pictures bleed off the page in a fairly monotone color.

Now start Bridge and select the images you want to appear on the spread. Right-click and choose Add image(s) to book and the images should appear on the blank spread. (If you do not have this menu, first look in Bridge's preferences under Startup Scripts and make sure BookDesigner-Add is checked. If it is, and it is still not working, please contact me.)

You can import all images that Photoshop understands: JPEG, GIF, Photoshop's own PSD files, etc. But I would recommend that you only import finished and flattened files since ProAlbum-Designer isn't suitable for, e.g., RAW conversion or black-and-white conversions, even if it is possible. Spending too much time working on the individual images will be lost work if you must re-design the spread from scratch.

When images appear on the blank spread they are converted to smart objects, a recent feature introduced in Photoshop CS2. Smart objects enables you to shrink and enlarge images back and forth without quality loss. Even if the spread is saved and later loaded, your images have not lost any quality.

Before we proceed with the layout functions we need to mention color spaces. In ProAlbum-designer all templates are in the sRGB color space. Your images may be stored in another color space, for instance the larger Adobe RGB. Depending on your Photoshop settings you may or may not get conversion questions when importing files from Bridge. Refer to the Photoshop menu Edit>Color Settings... but make sure this conversion keeps you in sRGB.

6. Actions

Now let us return to the actual design job! The most important thing to do is to press V (Move Tool) and check the Auto Select Layer in the upper left corner. Photoshop will now automatically select the layer corresponding to the image you click on. This makes it possible to drag images around. Simply click on an image before you perform an operation on it.

For instance, if you would like to scale or rotate an image, you first click on it. (You will see that the corresponding layer in the layers palette is selected.) Now press Cmd-T (Ctrl-T in Windows) and control points will be laid out for rotating or scaling the image. Remember to hold the shift key down to maintain the aspect ratio. If the image you are scaling is much larger than the page, some of the control points will appear outside the spread. Press Cmd-0 (Ctrl-0 in Windows) to zoom out far enough. In these situations it is very useful to work in fullscreen mode.

At any time you can go back to Bridge, select a few more images and add them to your current spread.

Another important feature of Photoshop is the ability to select several images. There are several ways to do this, they all assume you have the Move Tool active.

1. Click on the first image. Then hold down the Shift key and click on the remaining images, or:
2. Click on the first image’s layer in the layers palette. Then hold down Cmd (Ctrl on a PC) and click on the other layers, or:
3. Use the mouse to drag a selection around the images you want to select. This works well if the images you want to select are already grouped together.