I've been shooting weddings for about four years but never did anything beyond 4x6 proofs in Art Leather albums. I lost a number of weddings over the years because I didn't have fancier album options available. So last week I started working on my first KISS Book. I have to say, I'm really impressed so far, and I think our relationship is going to work out really well. Here are a couple tidbits that might be useful to others.

I'm using InDesign for doing the layouts. I've worked with Photoshop quite a bit and knew going into this that it wasn't going to work well for albums. I know there are some other album designing tools out there, but I wanted to stick with Adobe. It's pretty slick to jump between the layout in InDesign and editing in Photoshop. Also, I bought the tutorial video and it was very much worth the money. It would have taken me *hours* to figure out how to do some of the stuff that's covered.

In the video Kevin mentions you should use jpeg files. I wanted to use .psd files so I could continue editing them as I went along. The .psd files work just fine, so don't be afraid to use them.

A few hours after submitting my album to KISS I got a response back from "The Helpful Hottie" saying there were some problems with my file. Wow, this is really cool. Somewhere on the other end of the Internet tube system there's a hottie sitting there double checking my work. It turns out I had to increase the resolution on a bunch of the .psd files. This was pretty easy to do, and now the files have been sent back. Hopefully it passes the hottie test this time.

So now I just have to wait 10 working days. I can't wait!

If you haven't seen their books in person you're absolutely going to pee your pants when you get your shipment.... they are amazingly beautiful and the support behind KISS books is incredible! Congrats on your new relationship - it's one that's made to last.

PS. i use PSD files in my album designs too. While I have yet to order my first KISS book due to some hold ups with a recent client, I know that when I do my clients will be blown away, and I'll want to keep the book for myself lol.

InDesign certainly supports PSD files (one of the beautiful things about it), but I didn't want to get into anything too crazy on that tutorial. I usually do only JPEGs, because whatever I'm building in InD are the same files the client will get on their CD with the originals and I don't want to have to go back and export from PSDs to JPEGs at the end of the day.

But that's just muh way.

Looking forward to getting you that KISS.

k

WHAT?! You can export an InD file to PSD? And have editable PS layers?! TELL ME MOOOOOOOOOOORE!!!!!!

Hahah. No. You can place PSDs _into_ InD, without having to flatten them as a JPEG or TIFF or whatever (like you had to do with Quark).

Oh... yeah, i knew that. I REALLY got my hopes up for a second! DAMN YOU SWAN!

I love my KISS, the brides love my KISS. Whoever I showed this book to, fell in love with it (including the fabric cover). This is the only book I bring in when I meet the clients.