By: Kristen Castillo
From thoughts of proclaiming your vows, dancing to your song and cutting the cake, wedding day memories will always be fresh in your mind. Thankfully, your wedding album preserves all these special images and helps the day and details come back to life.
Traditional albums are full of portraits and group photos. But the newest trend in wedding albums takes things up a notch. Whether hardbound or in a standard album, these photo books are like very sleek digital scrapbooks.
Tricia Estrada of Digital Magic Memories says these new albums are magazine style featuring precise attention to detail and lots of creativity.
“I allow the photos to create the pages for me,” says Estrada who works her magic on digital images and scanned photos. She can color the album pages, make changes to the photos and use special effects to overlay vows, journal entries, song lyrics and graphics. The look is one-of-a-kind.
“I haven’t seen anyone else doing it,” she says. And so this former Qualcomm marketing associate has cornered a market on these cutting edge albums. “I can really customize what becomes a complex book,” she says.
The more images a couple can provide, the more Estrada can do to make the album unique. She can craft the album on her own or work side by side with the bride and groom.
Couples call the shots, deciding what they want to include in their album. Why not document the bridal shower, bachelorette party, engagement parties and even the honeymoon? A digital album can showcase these fun memories in style.
A custom digital album isn’t just for newlyweds. Due to time constraints and budget concerns, many couples never get around to creating an album after they get married. Time passes and they’ve got a box of photos and no way to display them. With this new type of album, couples have a great way to package and preserve their wedding day images.
Estrada created her own wedding album a few years after she married. Her first albums were all about family, which is how she got the idea of the digital album concept. “My kids were my inspiration,” she says. “I’ve always loved photos and doing special effects on photos.”
Digital photo albums look amazing and detailed. Designing the albums is a time consuming process (it takes an hour to craft a two page layout) but Estrada loves it. The creativity keeps her motivated and focused on every album. “There are so many options,” she says. “It’s endless what we can do.”
Estrada can crop images, color them and add lots of details like favorite sayings, clip art and crafty touches like a scanned invitation as an album backdrop. One glance at each page begs for another look. There’s so much to absorb from the images and the album design. In each album, the images, graphics and wording come together to tell the story.
Pages are professionally printed and then sent to a bindery in San Pasqual to create the finished product. Brides and grooms have a completed book within four to six weeks which is relatively fast for such top notch results.
Albums prices start at bargain $800 while extra charges apply for scanning photos or purchasing a leather album.
These photo albums can even come to life. Estrada offers another option where couples can have their album timed to music for a professional slideshow of the wedding story.
There are so many ways to remember life’s special moments. Video and traditional albums showcase the wedding day so well and now digital photo books can take the images a step further with snazzy graphics, cool quotes and photo design that rival a high end glossy magazine.
