Photoshop :: Creating A Wedding Album Template

I do a lot of photography and like to create pages in Photoshop to be used with companies who create albums such as SharedINK and AsukaBook.

There are a few nice software options out there such as Yervants Page Gallery, You Select It, Fotofusion, Pixel Creator Pro, etc. that help in designing album layouts. There are also some sites catering to Photoshop actions that create pages based on templates as well.

I'm seeking advice about the best way to create my own templates in Photoshop. Currently I am thinking of the following way.

1. Create my page template with guides and proper dimensions for the book company I plan to use. So I would create a 10x10 inch page and set guidelines for dpi/bleed/trimming for example.

2. I then would create clipping layers for each image and then arrange them all on a copy of the canvas background.

3. I would also add some line art, colored boxes, and perhaps adjust the opacity on some of the images.

Finally, I would save the file into a PSD format.

My thinking is that I could re-use the file again and simply replace the images in the clipping masks.

A few other ideas for creating a template in Photoshop might be to experiment with Smart Objects or Cutout Masks.

I have an interest in supplying a few of these templates to friends and associates who design wedding albums, family albums, or simply to showcase their photography and artwork.

I'm curious what others think about the best way to create a template in photoshop that could be used in a Wedding Photo Book for example "without" having to purchasing hundreds of dollars worth of 3rd party template software. In fact, I've actually heard that Yervant's Page Gallery and You Select It will export to PSD, but they will not create a very good template in Photoshop. There are limitations I've heard, thus designing in Photoshop from the beginning seems the best way. Plus the sky's the limit with creating your own designs.

Finally, I should mention that there is nothing wrong with having a 3rd Party template workflow. I in fact just purchased a copy of Fotofusion and it's fabulous for creating fast photo collages and then mixing them up again to gain a fast view of alternate layouts.

This is a relatively new area I think for most Photoshop users, but with the advent of Digital Photography and the reduction in price for published styled albums, I think more and more people will be interesting in creating their own templates. Not to mention creating templates above and beyond the basics which I'm seeing a lot lately. You wouldn't believe how basic some of the Photoshop pages are floating around and how much people are charging for them. They're simple to make in Photoshop and thus the desire to create my own templates.