Rugby World Cup fever is gripping New Zealand at the moment, which ties in nicely with my topic (sort of). Twenty teams are here to be beaten by the mighty All Blacks. (Go you good things!)

OK, all the teams want to win, but only one can. Whereas our goal is to deliver the best possible books and albums, so everyone wins. How’s that for cheesy? But we mean it!

We have had an influx of press book orders over the last few months and nearly everybody has been over the moon about them. However not everyone has had the same warm fuzzy feeling.

Why? Often it’s the nature of the product itself.

Press books are books. Not albums. When you design them you need to remember they’re three dimensional. Like all perfect bound books and magazines, the pages curve in to the centre, and Photojunction doesn’t show this very well.

I raised this with our developers and the design team. The dev team have increased the photo safe guides to 10mm from the spine. The designers say that’s helpful, but you can’t depend on it to keep you out of trouble. They’ve written a post of their own about this.

But back to the rugby analogy. Press books are great in that they enable you to design with lots more pages and images, but maybe in your case you need to field a different team. If you love the look, touch and feel of our art papers, but want a lay-flat product, check out our press albums.

Good luck to the boys in Black, and to the other teams and their fans coming down under.

I’ve hidden the remote from my wife and it’s time to sit back and enjoy the fireworks.

Cheers
Pete

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I have a lot of fruit trees at my place but two of my favorites are a Peachcot and a Peacharine. These are cross pollinations between a peach and an apricot and a peach and a nectarine. Individually beautiful to eat, but when you blend the two together you get something special.

The guys at Queensberry and Photojunction have been doing a bit of cross pollinating of their own.

Press albums are the new kid on the block for us. Taking two products, both beautiful in their own right, and blending them together to get something unique and special. The album options of a matted overlay or flushmount style album blended with the texture and feel of art papers printed on our Indigo press.

Wow, bam, lets put them in the blender and come up with a cocktail of pure delight.

If you have a gap in your market between press books and albums, let us fill it for you.

If you have Photojunction 1.53 then check it out. If you don’t here is the link to download.

Contact your account managers for more details.

BTW, while we are using fruit metaphors here’s the cherry on top.

Who’s tried the new film strip aperture tool in PJ yet?

All you need to do is have a series of images in a row on your layout either vertical or horizontal. Select them all, so the apertures are highlighted, then right-clck on them. A pop up menu will appear and one of the options will be Make horizontal film strip, or Make vertical film strip. Photoshop kicks in and merges them together. One aperture from multiple images.

Anyway, some cool stuff to have a look at.

Cheers, Pete

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Sorry, I digress. Coach wants me back on the field, keep it short and get over the line.

Come on, Ref, blow the whistle and let’s get started!

6. Alignment tools

OK, I’m cheating a bit here – this isn’t a button but a complete tool kit. But get these working for you and life becomes easy. Here’s a video to get you going.

7. Duplicate button

How often have you got a message saying Aperture A is similar to but doesn’t match aperture B? Which causes the other error message everyone loves, that A and B don’t align! One way to minimize this is to use Duplicate. Select the aperture on your layout that you want to duplicate, and, in the tools window, select Add, or simply type CMMD-D (Apple) or CTRL-D (Windows). Hey presto, two identical apertures and a lot less problems.

8. Open In Editor

This one appears in several locations. Why? Because it’s so good it’s worth repeating. With your default editing program set up in Preferences, select the image you want to lay a bit of Photoshop love on, and hit Open In Editor. Works for the exported page layouts too. (Open In Editor makes Photojunction your Photoshop Control Centre – that’s got a nice ring to it!)

8a. (It’s my post, I can do that)

My favorite Open In Editor option is to open the cropped image. This isolates the actual image area that’s going to appear in the book. Great for actions like vignettes.

9. Copy and Paste

This is under the Effects section in the Tools window image tab. You can copy and paste an effect such as a border without having to enter the details over and over for each image. Just copy once and paste away to your heart’s content.

10. The Send Order button

You’ve done your bit, used all your favorite buttons, drop downs and short cuts, and it’s time to kick the ball to Queensberry (they’re a safe pair of hands!)

Those are some of our favourites.

What are yours? You never know, your favourite might be one the rest of the team don’t know about. While we’re at it, what new buttons would you like to see?

Cheers
Pete

PS Sorry if you don’t get my rugby jokes. I don’t blame you, but we don’t follow the NFL, you know? Hmm… NFL stands for Not Football League, doesn’t it?

PPS And I’m still not convinced that soccer is football either.

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Coach reckons this isn’t as clever as Divide and Conquer but we think it’s really cool. Do you have a collection of templates that you love and use all the time? Click Create Album from Templates, select an image collection and your template collection, and PJ will build an album from the templates and pop all the images in the apertures.

Sit back, have a coffee if you’re American, or a nice cup of tea if you’re a Brit. You Aussies will want a cold one, and as for us in New Zealand, it’ll be a nice Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough, thank you.

Just let PJ do its thing. Actually it only takes a few seconds so take care not to spill your beverage on the keyboard. Like Divide and Conquer, this one’s under the Event window More button.

5.Split templates

Ok, one more about templates, the Split option. Like one side of a double sided template but not the other? Click on the template and then hit the Split button. This one really is a button. It divides the template into left and right sides. Once you’ve done that you can also copy and mirror or rotate them, which can be handy.

That’s our first five. I will be back for the second half shortly.

Cheers
Pete

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Unlike a lot of our customers I’m relatively new to Photojunction. Luckily I work with a great team, so when required they make me look good. The cool thing is that I look at Photojunction and discover things about it daily that I didn’t know.

There are features that are a little hidden. It’s a bit of a shame, really, that they aren’t more obvious, because usually they do something that can change the way you work for the better.

So I thought it would be nice to share our ten favorite buttons (in no particular order).

1. Open templates in new window

Place your cursor over Template Collection in the Events window and right-click. This will ask if you would like to open your templates in a new window. No more scrolling up and down between the templates and the images!

2. Undo

OK, this isn’t a button but an Edit menu selection, but I think it’s everyone’s number one so it has to be in. Those who had the pleasure of working in PJ Retro will remember that you only had one edit/undo chance. These days it’s sheer luxury to be able to undo multiple levels.

3. Divide and Conquer

OK, Divide and Conquer worked for the Romans so why not us? Basically you tell Photojunction how many images you want per layout and the software spreads the images you’ve selected out across the pages in chronological order. That’s a pretty basic description but PJ is a bit smarter that that. It knows the time you shot each image based on the exif data. So you can decide on a time gap (eg 30 minutes) and when PJ finds a gap of that size or more between images it thinks, OK, this must be a new series, so it starts a new page. (Darn, this isn’t a button either. It’s UNDER a button – in the Event window under the More button).

§

Well I’m a bit brassed off, really. I wanted to split this into two posts, and crack a joke about us being a Rugby nation and this being half time. But Coach reckons if I make the posts too long you’ll stop reading.

I guess I’ll have to go with us being a Netball nation and this being the end of the first quarter. Either way I’m off for an orange and a team talk. I’ll be back on the court shortly.

Cheers
Pete

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Photojunction and Photoshop are no exception, and, as PJ takes advantage of more, often newer, features of Photoshop, its “backwards compatibility” with older versions is lessened.

That’s why we recommend that you use Photoshop CS3 or later with Photojunction.

If you use CS2 or even earlier, chances are that it will work fine, but you may occasionally find that some PSD files don’t import correctly as images or templates, or that you get error messages when exporting with PS scripting.

If that happens, all Support can do is offer one of two options:

• Upgrade to the latest release of Photoshop (v3 at least!), or

• In Photojunction, use the new Export, Print and Assemble service for Queensberry, so we can do the exporting at our end.

Cheers,
Ian

PS In certain circumstances using the Photojunction Direct export option will do the trick, but PJ Direct produces a flattened file, unsuitable for Queensberry Full Colour service. It also won’t work for Queensberry press books.

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Don’t muck about with your hi res files outside Photojunction after they’ve been imported.

The key words there are outside Photojunction. If you want to keep the software smiling, they’re important. It means you need to think about when and how you copy image files, and when you are going to do your artwork. Here are three alternative scenarios, which all keep PJ happy if used properly:

1. Do art work on your images before importing them. This is so you can import one set of finished files without lots of extra images, sub-folders etc to confuse you. But it probably means you need to choose the images before you import them, and that may not be a good thing since PJ has so many good client interaction tools built-in.

2. Do the art while you’re working in Photojunction. You do this using the tools in Photojunction, and not necessarily just the built-in effects or borders. The Open In Editor button at the bottom of the tools window could be one of my favourite buttons in PJ. This allows you to open up the image of your choice in Photoshop, do the art work that you require and then save it back into Photojunction. You can decide if you want the artwork on the original image, a copy of the original image or the cropped version you’ve used in the album layout. The changes and copies get saved back to your hi res files. Great if you want to preserve the original or use it for other projects. Photojunction is still happy and still knows where to look for the file when it comes time to export. And, unless you turn it off in Preferences, Photojunction now automatically replaces the image in your album design with the new copy.

3. Do your art work after the album layouts are exported. This tends to be a common option, and for certain things I can understand why. However the drawback for me is that you still have a high res file that is not art-worked. Remember, the exported layout becomes an entity in its own right. This means that if you go back into your album in Photojunction, the ex-girlfriend that you removed from the group shot on the exported layout will still be in the original hi-res and the proxy image in Photojunction.

“So what?” you may say, but this means the reports PJ generates (which we use as a guide when assembling the album) now won’t look like the exported layouts, which could mean a query back to you to make sure we are using the correct files. After all, we want it right just as much as you do, and things like adding text or swapping out images after exporting causes confusion. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t edit the layouts by doing things like adjusting colours or replacing PJ’s border effects with your own secret recipe.

Simple stuff again!

Cheers,
Pete

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There is a wide variety of ways people set up and work with their files, and sometimes they lead to confusion and frustration.
Here’s the first of a couple of posts that will help.

Place your files somewhere safe.

Your desktop may not be the best place to save files, because you may have a tidy up and delete something that you may want to retain, at least until you get your album back.

On the flip side you don’t want to bury them deep in a pile of sub folders. Photojunction is very much like the average Kiwi. We’re simple folks who can get led astray. So keep it simple, or Photojunction (or you) could end up getting lost and confused.

Kind of like me on St Patricks Day in London 1999.

Simple stuff, but it works wonders.

And we’re here to help if you need it at info@photojunction.com.

Cheers,
Pete

PS We have a saying. A PJ support member doesn’t let a PJ user drive Photojunction while angry … an innocent album could get hurt.

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Sorting them into Groups and Collections will stop that…

There are Image Groups and there are Image Collections.

Image Groups can be great for narrowing down your groups of images. They keep your images separated. You could sort by the time of day, making it easy to only look at portraits when you are building a portrait layout, or you could reject images and not have to look at them at all. Once you put an image into a Group it is removed from the default group “unsorted”. This is sort of like keeping your images in folders, they can only be in one place.

Image Collections are a bit more creative. Danny used to always explain that they were a bit like playlists in iTunes.
Not wanting to insult anyone, they are also like playlists on a Zune.

Your images can be in multiple collections, and they will always stay in the All Images Collection. Here you could sort out favorites, maybes, client picks etc. My favorite image collection of all is the Images Used Collection.

Try them out, experiment with what works best for you. I guarantee you’ll like it better than always looking through ALL your images throughout your entire design process.

Can’t wait to hear what works best for you!

Angelique

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Windows Vista and Windows 7: C:\Program Data\Photojunction\

Windows XP: C:\Document and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Photojunction\

Mac: Macintosh HD:Users:Shared:Photojunction:

If you’re shifting to a new computer, just move the ENTIRE FOLDER to the equivalent location on the new machine.

Some people may have moved their PJ Project files (client/event/album data) to a different location. If that’s the case you’ll need to move them separately. The same applies to your Preferences and of course all your output files, such as page layout files and movies.

You’ll find the paths to your own “Project Folder” and “Saving Folder” (output files) in your PJ Preferences.

We have a classroom movie about portable projects here.

HTH, Ian

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