About a month later after we had selected the photos, the next stage was to review the album layout and to choose a photo frame for our 24″ photo. Again, I was wrong to think that our new assigned coordinator, D, would be the one attending to us that day. Instead, they assigned K, who was said to be responsible for the layout of wedding albums.
As K showed us the proposed layout page by page, we reviewed each individual photo to see if there was anything we wanted him to edit and then, looked at the overall layout for that particular page. After we told him about the edits we would like to have for our photos, he went to another room, made the changes on the spot and got us to review them again. Though this wasted more time, I was ok with it as we could review the edits on the spot.
I felt quite relieved after seeing the proposed layout as I have read reviews where bridal studios just place all the photos in grids of two/four/six photos in a page for the whole album as the layout. Hence, I was secretly pleased when I saw the layout and only had a few requests. Sunshine was satisfied with the layout too. However, as K was black-faced throughout (maybe that’s his usual face?), I found it quite uncomfortable to convey our wants to him as 1) I was not sure if he understood because of the lack of acknowledgement, 2) Even when he acknowledged our requests, his face was still very black and hence, I was not sure if it was an unreasonable/difficult request. In fact, for one of my request, all I asked was for him to remove a “stray strand” of gown which looked out of place as the rest of my gown was already removed/cut away with the proposed layout. However, he had difficulty understanding my request and kept saying that it would be impossible to edit the photo. I gave up on this request eventually and it was only until he was reviewing this same photo again in its original format (ie. not in the layout format), that he saw what I had been trying to tell him and proposed for the stray strand of gown to be removed =.= thankfully, he saw it himself. Well, even if he did not, I guess I can live with this imperfection. However, there was another one which I cannot accept: one of our photos was superimposed on another photo which had a long bench/table in it. When superimposing the second photo on top, they made the photo so “translucent” that the bench could be seen to be below the second photo, resulting in me looking like I had a bench pierced through my gown (see picture below):
This was something I definitely could not accept and again, I had to explain myself a few times before K finally understood what I mean (Few months later, we learnt that he either did not understand it or totally did not note it down as the original layout was still printed and presented to us when we went to collect our album in Sep 2017!!! Omg! More about this at a later time). My advice to all who are at this stage is to really look at the photos/layout carefully because once the album has been printed, it would be too late to make any changes (well, you can pay to reprint definitely, but there is no point).
After he noted down our requests and confirmed them with us, we proceeded on to choose our preferred photo frame and album covers! As I had trouble visualising how our photo frame and album covers would look like based on a small sample, we requested for actual samples of frames and albums and finally chose the following two as our photo frame and album cover:
Read Wedding Planning Chapter 14 – Selection of Wedding Photos here.
Read Wedding Planning Chapter 16 – Food Tasting At Novotel here.
