Wedding Albums

This article is all about the main types of wedding albums out there.  I will concentrate on the three main ones:

• Overlay albums
• Digital Albums
• Traditional albums

Overlay Wedding Albums

An ‘Overlay Wedding Album’ is an album that uses  traditional prints from your wedding and then overlays those prints with a matt, or border.  The matt can be different colours, but is usually white or black.

Example of an overlay album

The matt itself can be different shapes and sizes and contain different apertures (spaces for your photos).

Example of an overlay album

The cheaper ones are bought part assembled, whereby the photographer will attach the photos to each page and apply a mount to ‘frame’ the image.

The most expensive are bespoke made, so you’ll have a choice of cover materials, page colours, edging colours, etc.

One of the most used overlay wedding albums are by Mario Acerboni, and an examplof the type of overlays can be seen below:

Overlay wedding album in white

Digital Wedding Albums

A digital wedding album is an album in which the images are digitally printed directly onto the pages of the album, giving an edge to edge look to the photographs.  The digital album is also much easier to use if you want to be more creative and add ‘fades’ and ‘merges’ to images.

Digital wedding album example

Digital wedding album example

Both of the images above have a background photograph with one or more photographs laid on top.  This allows you and the photographer to tell the story of the weeding and include as many elements as needed to convey what happened.

Digital wedding albums give you and the photographer more creative passion to design your wedding album together.

It is usual for you and the photographer to get together after you have chosen your images and design the layout of the album together.  This means you get what you want – which is a special ‘one in the world’ wedding album.

Digital wedding album example

As you can see with a digital album you can get the best of both worlds!  The best maker for this type of album is Graphistudio, although there are a lot of newcomers to the market.

The great benefit of a digital album is that it can be reproduced should anything happen to your main album and also that the pages on a digital wedding album can be thicker, making it last longer and the final (and best for me!) is that you can touch the pages and not have to worry about getting fingerprints on the images!!!

Traditional Wedding Albums

The traditional wedding album is one that you Mum and Dad and possibly even your Gran and Grandad would recognise today.

It consists of individual pages that have one image placed onto them.  It is sometimes possible to get two smaller images.

Traditional wedding album

Each page in a traditional wedding album has an spacer page to help prevent the photograph sticking to the reverse of the previous page.

Traditional wedding album

These albums usually come supplied with a presentation box to store the album.

Traditional wedding album box

Digital versions of Traditional wedding albums

Yes – you read that correctly!  It is possible to create a digital version of a traditional look album.  This gives you the benefit of an old fashioned look whilst retaining the best parts of the digital world.

The Artemis Collection - Digital yet Traditional wedding album

The Artemis Collection - Digital yet Traditional wedding album

The Artemis Collection - Digital yet Traditional wedding album

Summary

In summary the type of album you would like should also dictate the photographer you should work with.  Many photographers offer only one type of album and you should be aware that quality may suffer if they agree to produce an album that you want but they have not made before!

Andrew Miller Photography works with digital albums and traditional albums.

Thanks

Andrew

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