Previous |  Contents | Next Download the eBook “Measure results, change activities.” — Keith Cunningham Focused I’ve never met a photographer with a more analytical approach to his business than Craig. He was a wedding photographer whose goal was to clear “100k in 100 Days” from 30 weddings. (The actual figures don’t matter — they just sound snappy — so I’m not going to tell you when, where or in what currency.) Many a photographer has built a profitable business out of shooting 30 or 40 weddings a year, bur Craig’s To View More >>

Heather is proud of our press books. Here she explains why… How 95% of the press/photobook market works First you buy a very expensive machine. Then you focus on how fast you can run it, how cheaply you can buy your paper, and how quickly you can bind and make covers. You print 4-colour. Above all else you focus on FEEDING THE MACHINE. You sell your product as cheaply as you can - and certainly not just to professional photographers. You don’t worry too much about colour because your customers don’t expect a lot, and probably think that a bad result is their own fault anyway. To View More >>

Today we're announcing free album design and free standard colour correction on all our professional albums - Flushmount, Overlay Matted, Classic Matted and Duo. Here's why... When we're discussing how we can improve our products and services, we ask ourselves three questions: Can we make it fun? Will it save you time? Will it make you money? This time we're aiming for all three :) Many of our customers pay us to colour correct their images. Many pay us to design their albums as well. Many more wish they could afford to do the same. ALL OF YOU are going to enjoy one of two things. A fresh chance To View More >>

Pete and Ian have been blogging about colour management systems and how they help to ensure your image editing work delivers predictable colour and high-quality printing. But there's a lot to think about! Even the light you're working in can affect the results … or the clothes you're wearing, or the colour of your walls. So what could be easier? Getting us to do the work! Here's an incredibly simple new service, and a special offer: Batch Colour Correction by Queensberry in Lightroom. You can use our plugins, no matter where you are in the world, to send us DNG files from raw images you select To View More >>

Pete started off his recent posts by saying that colour management is one of the cornerstones of digital photography, but often misunderstood. Let me describe what you can reasonably expect from a sound colour management system consistently applied (certainly not miracles!). What you can expect 1. A reasonable indication of what your final print will look like (assuming you're sending the files print-ready). 2. To avoid gross errors (an Adobe 1998 file treated as if it's sRGB will look strikingly different, especially if colours go out of gamut). 3. Predictability: You can send your files to the To View More >>

Ian likes to talk about the good old days, when colour correction and colour management were a matter of picking up the phone and complaining to the lab. OK … I remember them too. Well, you can still outsource colour correction, but colour management is a shared responsibility now. In my earlier post I talk about screen calibration and soft-proofing, which most of us at least know about - but few people understand that taking all the care in the world over those won't be enough if your working environment is wrong. Try this experiment. First thing in the morning, sit down at your desk (where To View More >>

Colour management is one of the cornerstones of digital photography, it is also one of the most misunderstood. Some photographers are experts, some try to ignore the subject, some don't seem to have heard of it, others have read about it on forums or blogs and (kind of) get it. Years ago when our lab went digital, we brought in the experts to help set up our systems and get the best results from our printers. This relationship was not a one-date wonder. Ian and Jessica from NZ Colour Management have consulted to us regularly ever since. One thing's certain. If you use our print-ready service you To View More >>

Click here to watch the video on Vimeo. I remember someone in the graphic design industry (quite well known actually) posting a tweet saying, "Colour management is bullshit!" The picture that flashed through my mind was of graphic designers and brand managers hanging out at the printers, tweaking colours on the machine before they sign off on a job… And yet here we are at Queensberry, printing for very fussy photographers (often on the far side of the world), putting the prints into really pricey albums (sight unseen) and flying them at great expense to Europe, or North America, or Hong Kong. To View More >>

After talking to Jessica Mills from NZ Colour Management, I thought we should bring in someone from the front lines! Philip Laing is one of our lab support specialists, and if my conversation with him paints a picture of a bunch of people obsessed with quality and delivering you the best possible album, my work is done. If you get get an insight into the many ways in which our lab service is truly unique in the album business, even better! Philip is what we call a "support detective". With a stack of experience – and huge enthusiasm for photography – he's in the front line every day ensuring To View More >>

Why not design your albums in Photoshop or InDesign? A lot of people do, and they're great applications – we depend on them both ourselves. A few thoughts … Adobe don't think designing your albums in Photoshop is a good idea. That's not what it's for. Adobe's page layout software is InDesign. So how much does InDesign know about wedding and portrait photographers, their workflow, their albums and their suppliers? InDesign doesn't know what DPI your lab needs, or what file type, or what size the printed layouts should be, or about bleed and trim requirements, or what colour management processes To View More >>