The Junction


With the addition of long time Photojunction fan Angelique Buckley to the Photojunction support team, our support hours have changed slightly to better accommodate our friends in the US and UK.

There’s a wee gap between shifts due to the switch over between our NZ and US staff, but you’ll be well looked after for most of the day – and there’s even a bit of coverage for you moonlighters ;)

New Zealand: 8am – 4.30pm and 1am – 7am

Australia: 6am – 2.30pm and 11pm – 5am

UK: 2pm – 8pm and 9pm – 5.30am

US (East Coast): 9am – 3pm and 4pm – 12.30am

US (West Coast): 6am – 12noon and 1pm – 9.30pm

As always, please contact Photojunction support via our support email info@photojunction.com, or call us toll-free on the numbers listed here.

Remember also to check out our online help resources including our live webinar schedule, tutorial videos, and forums – all listed here.

Cheers, Nigel

Photo by: Kamila Harris Photography

Hi!

My name is Angelique Buckley, and I am the newest member of the Photojunction Support Team.

If you are an avid reader of The Junction like I am, you may have already heard of me. I’ve been featured on the blog four times already, and can’t wait to play a bigger role in the growth of Photojunction.

So a little background about me… I am a huge nerd and I love photography. Maybe that’s why I fit in so well into the Queensberry team?

I studied Graphic Design in school, minoring in business, and started designing wedding albums with my own in 2005. Back then I used Adobe InDesign because I didn’t know any better. But when I was introduced to an early beta (think pre-V1.0) version of Photojunction Remix, I was in love.

I love a challenge, so working with new software was right up my alley, and PJ was already so much better for album making than InDesign. I’d spent the previous 5 years working for Apple Inc, and helping to build PJ Remix was the perfect adventure to follow on from that role. I spent a lot of time exploring any new features I could find, whether I needed them or not.

Fast forward, from 2007 and the initial testing of PJ Remix, to now. The number of users for Photojunction has skyrocketed. But while I like to think it’s still an incredibly easy piece of software, everyone’s bound to run into something they need help with along the way.

The most frustrating thing about being a PJ user in the States? For me it was the jealousy of their “Summer Vacation” over Christmas. The second most frustrating thing though, was that when I had an issue, I knew that my support system was likely fast asleep on the other side of the world.

But I think we’ve found a great solution for everyone who encounters this issue.

I’m based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (with my husband, dog, and cat), which means I’ll be working a more useful set of support hours for PJ users in the US, Canada and UK.

I’ll normally be working Monday to Friday – 9am to 3.00pm (EDT), which translates to 6am – 12noon on the West Coast and 2.00pm – 8.00pm in the UK.

So that’s me. I have an odd obsession with weddings and photography, but I don’t want to be a photographer, I just want to help them. Some people find that odd. I find that the best tool for me is a computer, not a camera. So I will stick with what I know best.

Look forward to helping you all along the way!

Angelique

If you haven’t been to the Photojunction website or blog lately, you won’t recognise them.

What’s going on? Well, the old PJ site had to go, for several reasons.

• Danny was embarrassed by it (me too).

• PJ has changed so fast that a lot of the support info was out of date.

• There’s a bit of misinformation out there (I’ll get to that).

• And it’s high time we came out of the closet…

So here’s the story:

In case you don’t know, Photojunction is a Queensberry project. It dates back ten years to when we first realised that any album supplier without a software solution was history (we were right: some of them already are).

But as we developed the software we realised it would turn into an expensive overhead unless we did something creative … so what we tried to do was persuade other album manufacturers to work with us in developing a great solution that would work for everyone. In our mind, an industry partnership.

We set up a separate company (Photojunction Ltd). We built a Chinese wall between it and Queensberry and insisted that Photojunction staff didn’t promote Queensberry in any way. We offered all vendors the same power and functionality as us. We built more than two dozen sets of “Album Resources” … to support Queensberry’s competitors!

And it worked. Sort of.

Today our users number well into five figures (highest in our category) and at least half of them use the software to design albums other than Queensberry.

But with few exceptions most album companies never bought in … and it takes two to tango. By and large the vendors were simply too suspicious to work closely with us. Fair enough, I guess…

These days the deal with Photojunction is strictly between you and us. “For photographers. By Queensberry” as the new website says. And anyone can use it, no charge.

Now for the misinformation:

Does that mean Photojunction locks you into Queensberry? Absolutely not.

Does it mean you can’t use it with other vendors? No.

Does it mean we’d like you to sell Queensberry albums? Of course!

But if you never spend a dollar with us it’s still free. A taste of what Queensberry can do.

What else? To streamline things around here we’re taking down that Chinese Wall so we can build a better, unified Queensberry/Photojunction support team. The PJ blog and forum have already been moved to the Queensberry site (you can still subscribe separately) and the separate Photojunction phone numbers will disappear soon. The payoff will be improved service for you.

So there you go. We’re out of the closet.

We’re Photojunction. Welcome to Queensberry!

Cheers, Stephen

PS For our reconfigured support resources, forums, blog etc, head off to the new website.

If you’d like to read more about our story, it’s here.

For more about why we’re f.r.e.e. click here.

To comment on any of the issues I’ve raised, please have your say below, or click here (you’ll need to login to post).

Photojunction also harnesses the power of Photoshop for you during the export stage of the workflow, when you can open and edit exported page layouts in Photoshop from within Photojunction, just as you did the original image files.

After you export your high-res page layouts (almost always using Photoshop) they become visible in the Export Layouts window.

The layout files will have been saved to your hard disk, and so under your care and control, and many people want to work on them before printing.

But you need to take care. If you rename or move the files, for example, Photojunction won’t be able to find them for uploading.

You can avoid problems if you open and work on the files from within Photojunction.

Just click the Open In Editor button in the Export Layouts window or double click on a layout and it’ll open up in Photoshop for you.

Provided you export the layout as a PSD, Photojunction makes it easy to do your creative and corrective edits, because it makes each element in your layout (images, text, backgrounds etc) a separate layer.

But there are things you shouldn’t do. I’ve already explained why you shouldn’t rename or move the files. But please don’t change image dimensions, the position of images on layouts, resolution or file type either, or you could introduce more problems, which PJ’s internal error-checking won’t be able to detect – for example a mismatch between your album design and your print files, or print files that don’t match the lab’s specifications!

If you do want to change the layout, no problem: just go back to Photojunction, redesign the layout, return to the Export Layouts screen and re-export that layout so the print file you send off to your lab reflects the changes you’ve made.

Cheers, Nigel

PS No problem? Not unless you decide to redesign the layout AFTER you do the creative Photoshop stuff…

Danny’s away at the moment so I’m going to steal one of his lines… Photojunction knows it can’t be Photoshop, so doesn’t try to be. It harnesses the power of Photoshop instead.

Photojunction works seamlessly with Photoshop, allowing you to open an image or a layout in Photoshop from within Photojunction, work on it, then re-import it back into Photojunction.

But how it works depends on whether you’re working with your layouts (what you’re designing) or your images (what you’re designing with), so I’m going to split this topic into two posts.

Today we’ll look how to work with Photoshop to edit your images from within Photojunction.

The ‘How-to’:

Select an image either on your layout, or in your event window, and click the Open in Editor button at the bottom of the Image palette (or by right-clicking on the image). You’ll get three options:

- Open original file: You’ll be working on the original high-res file in Photoshop.
- Open duplicate file: Photojunction will duplicate the high-res original file so as to not mess with the original  (we recommend this option).
- Open cropped duplicate file: Choose this if you’ve cropped the image on your layout, and want to work with just the now-visible part : only the cropped part of the image will open in Photoshop.

Select the option that best works for you, follow the prompts, and the image will open in Photoshop for you to do what you need to with it. Once you’ve finished, save and close.

Photojunction will re-import that image back into Photojunction and reflect the changes to the images you’ve made. Nice.

Tomorrow we’ll look at working with entire page layouts in Photoshop.

Until then…

Nigel

The heart and soul of the high end wedding album: one day seminars in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne by Johannes van Kan. Check it out.

Hello Dears, PJ Nanny here.

I’ve been doing the housekeeping round here for (goodness me) years now, but I’ve never introduced myself because I don’t like to be a bother and I love seeing my boys and girls in the spotlight.

But we … no, I … owe you an apology.

We released a new version a few weeks ago and on Wednesday afternoon Christine had a phone call from a nice young lady in Australia who had…

(Oh, I can’t bring myself to say how many)

… LOTS of “warnings” in the Photojunction Problem Reporter (my second favourite part of the program) and was feeling overwhelmed by them.

She’d stumbled on a bug (and we Grandmas don’t like bugs – I couldn’t sleep that night), so I made cupcakes for the Dev Team next morning and they very nicely fixed it right there and then – and posted a new beta the very same day.

They also told me, quite kindly, that some of you thought I was getting a bit too fussy in the latest release, and they added check boxes so you can hide my warnings about apertures with inconsistent spacings or sizes, or that are slightly misaligned.

That bug fix (and hiding my messages) brought the young lady’s warnings down from (I’m sorry, I still can’t say how many) to ten, which really were, as you youngsters say, deal-breakers.

I must say I’m of two minds about this.

I don’t approve of sweeping stuff under the carpet, my dears, but there you go, you can if you must.

So if the young lady is reading this, I haven’t met you but I’m so sorry.

Bless you all, and please cover up outdoors.

PJ Nanny

PS We may release an updated Final as well, but the bug only happens if you have wings or flips, and you can ignore my warnings, and anyway we’d need to do more testing first.

PSS My, I feel bad, because I’ve said “I” at least a dozen times, and now three more!

PSSS Do you like my costume? That nice Cory Thoman from Texas made it for me, but I embroidered the logo myself. Eat your heart out, Wonder Woman.

Each version of Photojunction takes us further towards a seamless workflow to design, export and upload your album orders to Queensberry – right first time and hassle-free..

If you’re using Queensberry this is just a reminder that you no longer need to use LabFTP.

Photojunction does it all, and the advantage is that the processes are managed and automated – so there’s minimal opportunity for anything to go wrong, and you’ll get your album faster.

Cheers, Ian

July’s webinar schedule is up and about on our Webinar Schedule page.

Check it out.

You’ll notice our Tips, Tricks and Power Features webinar is making an appearance at the end of the month, and we’ve varied the times to better accommodate our friends in the UK and Australia.

Hope to see you on one of them.

Cheers, Nigel

PS Danny’s headed off on holiday for a few weeks, so Ian and I will be presenting them while he’s away. It’ll be awesome ;)

During our Photojunction webinar today someone asked how to hide the images in the Event window, which they’ve already used in their current album design. The same question’s just popped up on Twitter too, so here goes…

The simple answer is this:

Hit the More button in the Event window and select Hide images used in album.

That’ll remove from the Event window all the images you’ve used in your album design.

To have them show back up, select the new option Show images used in Album under the More menu.

That’s pretty simple. But there’s a few other features I think you’ll be interested in…

To find our where you’ve used an image within your album design, right-click on the image in the Event window, and select Jump To.  Photojunction will ‘Jump-to’ and display the layout it’s used on. And if it’s used in more than one place, Photojunction will display each layout it appears on. Epic.

Lastly, the Images Used collection.

Have a look in your Image Collections (left hand side of the Event window) and you’ll find one there called ‘ Images Used’. Yep, Photojunction automatically builds a collection of all the images you’ve used in your current album design. A great way Photojunction helps keep those images accessible and organised for you.

HTH

Cheers, Nigel