Welcome to the Photojunction Team blog. We welcome your comments.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2010.
Just a quick note to let you know that Photojunction (and Queensberry) will be closed this coming Monday, 1 February (New Zealand time) due to a public holiday.
We’ll be back on board on Tuesday so have a great weekend and we’ll see you then!
Cheers, Danny
PS Lots of great feedback from Ian’s email – tell us what YOU think.
When Photojunction is this intuitive our job is done. Since we still have a way to go, here’s a handy hint from Stephen’s daughter Charlotte.
Charlotte could use a computer quite impressively before she could read (doubtless many households can tell a similar story). When Stephen asked her how she learnt she just said she tried things, pulled down menus etc, to see what they did. Once she learnt what the OK and Cancel buttons did, and that “www” meant something interesting to explore, there was no stopping her.
So there ya go – just play.
Cheers, Ian
PS I saw the video on Gizmodo – very interesting blog post about interfaces.
If you missed yesterday’s advanced Photojunction webinar, grab your popcorn because a recording is now up on our Vimeo channel.
Click here to watch the latest ‘Advanced Photojunction webinar’
We tweaked the format to last week’s session and covered several broader Photojunction features in detail:
- Templates (organising your collections, purchasing, creating your own, drag and drop)
- Portable Projects (using Photojunction in a team and/or over a network)
- Slideshows (videos of your images and albums, really fast)
- Plus a time of Q&A
Thanks also to Christine from our support team who joined us to help answer your questions during the webinar.
Keep an eye out here on the Junction, and our Facebook page for details about next week’s Photojunction webinar.
Cheers, Nigel
A good question about templates came up in one of our recent webinars and we want to cover it for everyone…
If you drag and drop an album template onto a different sized layout, Photojunction (normally) treats the apertures as a ‘Group’ and scales them down (or up) to fit them into the layout.
That means a 7×5 aperture on a 12×12 template (for example) would be scaled to an irregular size if you dropped it onto a 14×10 layout, and could require some adjustment.
Here’s a little catch. Because Photojunction drops apertures onto a new layout as a ‘Group’, you’ll need to first ‘Ungroup‘ them before you can edit each aperture individually.
Now that’s great, but how can you drop a template onto a different sized layout, but retain the apertures’ original size?
By holding the SHIFT key while dropping the template onto the new layout. Photojunction will retain the apertures’ original sizes and spacing (so long as the new layout isn’t too small) and treat each aperture as separate (ungrouped).
Here’s an example to demonstrate the difference. A 12×12 template of four 3.5×3.5 apertures has been dropped onto both sides of this 14×10 layout.
The ‘Group’ of apertures on the left have been adjusted down in size to account for the reduced height of this layout, while the apertures on the right, dropped holding the SHIFT key, have retained their original size (3.5×3.5).
This SHIFT key trick is particularly useful if your album supplier charges for non-standard aperture sizes on matted albums, or if you want to use particular aperture groupings in a variety of album sizes.
We cover this and plenty of other useful tips, tricks and power features in a recent webinar we recorded and uploaded to our Vimeo channel here.
Cheers, Danny
UPDATE: This recording has been removed and replaced by an updated version of our Advanced Photojunction webinar available for viewing here.
Last week we jumped in the deep end and kicked off this year’s Photojunction webinars with a brand new one – Tips, Tricks and Power Features.
This is a follow-up to our newbie webinar and a little more advanced, so we assumed attendees had (some) experience with the software.
In it, we covered lots of tips, tricks and power features including:
- Working with PSDs and JPEGs
- Sorting and selecting images
- Alignment
- Productivity features
- Working with clients
Plus I answered plenty of questions along the way.
It’s a little over an hour and our first crack, so be gentle 
Cheers, Danny
PS we’ll update this version with a tidier recording shortly.
We only mention this because some PJ users find it confusing. If you’ve never worried about it, read this post by all means … but then forget we ever brought it up!
Why does Photojunction talk about images and apertures? Because they’re not the same.
In a matted album the aperture is the hole the image peeks through.
Here’s what else you need to know.
If you think about it, image and aperture sizes are related. In standard overlay albums the image needs to be larger than the hole. On the other hand, in Queensberry’s Pagemount albums the hole is larger than the image, which is trimmed to reveal the base page behind it.
So when Photojunction talks about a “7×5″, for example, what does that mean exactly? And is it talking about the aperture or the image?
The answer is it’s talking about BOTH, which means “7×5″ is a NOMINAL DIMENSION – in other words, approximate, a label.
Because Photojunction has all the dimensions and relationships in its database you don’t need to worry about the exact sizes. Just understand that what you see on the screen when you’re designing is exactly what you’ll get in the finished album.
On the other hand, if you really want to know, Photojunction does display the exact dimensions, as you can see in the screen shot.
Our geeks could explain the whys and wherefores of all this, but honestly their explanations would drive me to drink. I just tell myself I don’t really know how my car or computer work either, but I can still drive them.
Cheers, Ian
PS One other point. As you can see in the screen shot you can change the image size (by selecting Customise in the aperture list), but you can’t change the aperture dimensions. PJ does that automatically to maintain the correct size relationship.
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