Week 5 – Automation – One More Key to Profitability
An easy way to increase profitability in business is to automate as much as possible. In this week’s challenge, we’ll show you a secret shooting trick to make it easier to design stunning albums and wall art, as well as two smart ways to automate your design workflow, saving you countless hours and hassle, and freeing you up to do more of what you love.
Shooting for the Spread or Wall Collage
The first key to a faster design workflow is to shoot for the spread and not the single image. This is a simple concept that can be implemented the very next time you go on a session. First shoot your main image and then shoot supporting images around that main image. This will allow you to design album spreads or wall collages where the colors, lighting, subject and emotion are all the same. Here are some examples of spreads and wall collages that show off this cohesion.
For more examples and to dive deeper into this concept, you can pick up the book Profitable Album Design and Sales on Amazon.com.
Storyboard Tagging = Automated Design
While wall art is usually just 4-5 walls, album design can be over one hundred pages. Spending the time to drag and drop all of those images into a design can be incredibly time consuming. By learning the power of storyboard tagging in Fundy Designer, you can auto design an album in minutes that will get you 90+% of the way there, but still have complete editing control over.
In the image browser, you can tag a photo(s) to be panorama images, where one image takes up both pages. You can select multiple images and group them together and even tag one of those images to be the main image on the spread. And finally, you can tag a photo, or photos, to be the cover photo(s). To learn how to use the auto design with quick, one-tap hot keys, watch this video with Fuji Ambassador Scott Johnson.
Automate Your Retouching
Finally, stunning images sell bigger albums and wall art. If your client has dark circles under their eyes, or their eyes aren’t bright and cheery they won’t buy as much. We are all leery of plastic-looking skin and that’s why we have incorporated Perfectly Clear into Fundy Designer. In just a few seconds, you can retouch an entire wedding shoot with stunning results. Check out this before and after.
To start, simply open up the image browser into film strip mode. Then select one image from the shoot and click on a preset. We recommend you start with Intelligent Retouch or Full Coverage. Then adjust the Skin Smoothing, Eye Enhancement and Eye Circle Removal to your liking. Finally, select all of the images and click sync. And that’s it. You can retouch hundreds of images in seconds.
Automation
The automation tools in Fundy Designer save photographers hundreds of hours per year. By implementing these tools in your business, your profit per client will increase and allow you to spend more time with your family, grow your business, or both.
CHALLENGE TO YOU – Before Next Week Challenge and your next shoot, go back to a shoot from last year and tag the photos you see as panoramas, as groupings across a spread, and as the cover image(s). Now, use the auto-design feature to see the potential album you could have sold your client. While you’re at it, go ahead and batch retouch images using Perfectly Clear and understand the time you will be saving going forward.
Do it all in Fundy Designer!
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