Are Wedding Albums Really Worth the Investment?

I love wedding albums. It’s how we finally chose to preserve our photos after thinking we lost them all! But not everyone shares my love. One of the most common objections people have to investing in a wedding album is kind of obvious: cost.

Albums are expensive! Have you ever wondered why? In learning about what we wanted to provide for our clients, I learned some awesome things about why a professional wedding album is really worth it. Here are some of the key factors that make a quality album worth every penny.

Wedding Albums: Cover quality

Beautiful textiles like luxe leathers and linens in heirloom finishes and colors are meant to get better with age. They’re meant to be touched and handled. And they’re meant to be devastatingly handsome on a coffee table or a built in bookshelf.

We look for albums that source their cover textiles from around the world, where each textile quality has the strongest reputation. Linens from France, leathers from Italy, silks from Japan. The cover textiles are usually sourced with long-lasting quality in mind and I personally love that!

Wedding Albums: Construction quality

We look for a flush mount album design. Flush mount albums have hard covers with thick, layflat pages. They consist of photographic prints that are dry-mounted on substrate to give you those unbending pages that we love so much. The covers, as I mentioned above are often made of leather or other fine materials and the photos lay completely flat and extend across the whole page.

Wedding Albums: Printing quality

There is suuuuuuch a big difference between printing styles and what they’re best at. And this is where we could cheap out and choose a less expensive printing method-it’s where a lot of the cost of production lays. But here’s why we don’t:

We are pretty specific about choosing albums using photographic printing. You’re probably familiar with press printing (even though you may not know the term)-the type of printing that involves spraying ink onto a paper in various ways-tiny dots or spray are the two most common. This easily accessible and enjoyable printing option leaves us with two concerns for albums:

1. it’s a more immediate printing solution, so it’s prone to yellowing, fading, and curling over time. In other words, this printing method isn’t intended to last a long time. It has other strengths, but longevity isn’t one of them.
2. because it’s only a translation of color, it doesn’t have the same amazing spectrum of color available with our printing method. 

WHY PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINTING?

Photographic paper prints are light sensitive—In the printing process, the paper is exposed to light inside the printer to produce the image. After that, chemicals are used to eliminate the light-sensitivity and set the image, which is now “in” the paper. This printing process means that, though it increases the cost, you have printing specifically made to last over time. No yellowing, curling, or fading. And due to the nature of the printing method, the color spectrum is true and rich, allowing for a variety of paper options not available for press printing.

Customer service

You’re investing into an heirloom! Because of your investment, we’re looking for a company that guarantees their work and will be there for you when you need them. This has been one of the biggest stress relievers for our clients-knowing that their albums have a guarantee.