Personally, I've had nothing to do with school photographers since I lined up for my own class photos, but I do pay attention to what Queensberry's clients do, and they're an important subset of our customer base. I think there's a lot to learn from them because they're serious about business and big on "systems". They need to be, given that a school gig might involve dozens of classes, each with thirty-odd kids, most of them with parents — potential customers — whom they've never met. Imagine if the way it worked was that they all emailed, To View More >>

If you specify Full Colour Service printing, we colour correct your images. The old fashioned way, one at a time. We don't run software shortcuts or bulk edit your images. Every single image (or layer) gets personal attention from our specialist colour correctors. It's their job to get your images looking their best and ready for printing and album assembly. Our colour correction policy is to achieve consistency across the images in your album and to optimise natural skin-tones ... and if we spot any problems, to let you know. Once we're done your images go straight to the lab for printing. No 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 >>

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 >>

In many labs these days the only people who look at your prints are the Dispatch team. Strange as it seems, that makes sense – it's your files they’re printing, and something has to give if you want low prices. But it doesn’t make sense at Queensberry. We critique everything we print, including Print-Ready. The difference is we see the image files with Full Colour Service (because it’s our job to colour correct them) whereas we don’t see Print-Ready work until it’s printed . But why review Print-Ready work at all? Print-Ready means you edit your images yourself, and we don’t modify To View More >>

It's been a busy year for Queensberry. We've made some minor changes to our classic albums, but the big news has been the launch of Musée and the Queensberry Press. We're big believers in the principle of "Good Better Best" as a way to tempt your clients' wallets and aspirations, and these new ranges reflect that. Beautiful as they are, we understand that our albums are a luxury for most people. The Queensberry Press isn't about albums, however, but books. Books have their own strengths — they can hold more images, they're as comfortable with text as with pictures — but part of their appeal To View More >>

Queensberry's colour correctors are passionate about their work and achieving a result that pleases you, but even if you're not using their services the way they approach the job is worth thinking about. When they get an order, the first thing our colour correctors do is open up all the layouts to get a 'feel' for the overall colour of the album. Their goal is to optimise key elements like flesh tones or a bride's dress, and to achieve a consistent, natural look across page layouts and the entire album. Often we see albums where individual images have been tweaked without thought for how they To View More >>

Cover layout design in PJ Remix Here are the first steps in preparing a perfect, hassle-free print-and-bind order, really fast. 1. First, upgrade to PJ Remix. If you have already, thank you. 2. Use Remix to design your cover as well as your page layouts. You'll get to frame and crop the cover image yourself, see exactly what it looks like and be sure that it looks good. For example, here you can see how much of the image in the photo front cover layout above has been cropped away. No problem in this case, but many images won't be suitable: 3. Export your cover AND page layouts using Remix's Export To View More >>

It’s no wonder Luke and Chantal’s wedding album caught our attention. For starters, there were three albums, not one, and the first two featured the most amazing celebrations at a fabulous location. We certainly did “wish we were there”. Luke and Chantal were married in April 2007 in Mauritius, East Africa. Chantal had wanted to have her wedding at The One and Only, Mauritius since she was a little girl and spent time there with her family. The festivities lasted five days and included a welcoming cocktail hour, beach Olympics, a salsa party (featuring Emilio Estevez and his salsa dancers) To View More >>

Let's wrap up this Problem reporter series and stop ignoring the elephant in the room… Who needs a problem reporter anyway? After all, as we confirmed at the webinar it drives some people nuts. Well I'm glad you asked! I should start by saying it's not an unusual concept. Try googling "pre-flight", for example, and check out the Wikipedia and Adobe listings in particular. What the pre-flight process does in the printing industry is ensure that digital files sent for printing are all present, valid, correctly formatted, and of the desired type. Why? Because, if they're not, the job can't be done. To View More >>