Hey All,

Gary Fong encouraged upselling your books using his software Album Design w/ Auto Drop. Has anyone tried Gary Fong's Album Design w/ Auto Drop? Is it worth buying? Or is their anything out there that is equivalent or much better to his product?

What do you think?
http://store.garyfonginc.com/gafodialdeso.html

M.J.

I wasn't too impressed with it when I saw it. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't want to buy it. If you know photosop at all you can do the same thing. All it was was actions. The only thing I don't really know how to do was open up the images, resize them, and drop them on the page. I would have to set an action to resize them, but I would have to manually drop them on the page.

The other thing that bothered me was the resizing. It made the images smaller than the size of the book. When I saw it demonstrated, Gary then used the transform and streached an image to cover the entire page. This would decrease the quality of that background image. When someone asked him about that, he said it didn't really matter if the quality was lower on that background image, becasue it would most likely be black and white with a lower opacity.

So, I don't need it... I made some of my own actions. I made actions for opening a new document the right pages size, resizing photos, adding stroke borders, and drop shaddows, tilts, ect.

I plan to check out indesign over the winter.

I bought and used it for one album design and then realized it was cramping my style and went back to completely freelancing it in Photoshop. I've tried InDesign as well, but I keep going back to PS for some reason. Probably because I touch up my photos while I'm designing the album.

So long story short. Yes I've bought and used it. But I wouldn't buy it again. If I was not comfortable with PS, then it may have been more worth it.

I have it. I think it's exactly what he says it is: a suite of actions to help you design albums quickly in Photoshop.

You just need to decide whether you actually want to use Photoshop or one of the alternatives.

I used it to design this album: Bronwyn & Kevin

I think there are definitely faster things out there, more drag and drop easy (those that work with proxy images rather than the whole file come to mind), but I do like the flexibility of designing in Photoshop and it's very affordable. Since it's essentially a set of actions, you can also tweak, add & remove, and otherwise customize it to your taste as you use it.

Disclaimer: I don't do a wedding every weekend and if I did I probably wouldn't want to take the time I do in album design. But for my non-template based designs, it works wonderfully. It's a good starting point for those that want to design in Photoshop, so if it gets you over that hump, go for it. If you're already really comfy with making your own sets of actions to do what it does, then go that route (the free but more time intensive route).

I bought it and have used it quite a bit...though I've had to modify a number of actions to get the images to work best for my workflow and albums (most are Graphi 9.5 x 13 -- Gary's actions don't put a large enough file into the canvas so autodrop is only a thumbnail idea generator). I wish he would continue to work to improve album designer actions...I think they have a lot of potential if there were more features in the actions...