Rangefinder Magazine
March 2005

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Creating Kevin Jairaj’s Designer Pano-Page by CharMaine Beleele

The crown jewel in Dallas, Texas, wedding photographer Kevin Jairaj’s arsenal of fashionable wedding products for stylish brides is his designer album of magazine layout-style pages. Kevin’s brides immediately notice his custom-designed albums sitting on the coffee table of his residential studio. Each page is a one-of-a-kind, 10x20-inch panorama.

Kevin says, “I like my albums to tell emotional stories. I strive to create captured moments the couple will cherish. I do not want them to see my album and think, ‘That’s nice; it looks like every other album out there.’ I strive for complex, yet tasteful designs that utilize key photos as essential background components of each page.”

While hastening to admit there are many ways to create a magazine-style page, Kevin willingly shares his technique for creating his famous “Designer Pano-Pages.”

He explains, “I mainly design for the Leather Craftsmen flush-mounted album, the LC3500, because my clients love that style, and I love the panoramic designs I can create.” A typical KJ Images designer album would have 20 pages, all specifically designed into 10x20-inch panoramas.

1. The page: Click on File > New.

2. The Canvas: Select white, 10x20 inches and 300dpi.

3. The Guides: Your first challenge is to build an invisible border, which will wall your design in so that trimming the prints will not cost you any elements of the images. To do this, look under View > New Guides. Set “0” to get the first vertical line, and go get the move tool.

4. More About the Guides: Put a vertical line at the 10 in. mark to give you a division between the 10x10 pages. This reminds you of where that center seam will be in a panoramic style book. Measure 1⁄4 inch from each side, top and bottom of the canvas: two horizontal and two more vertical lines. Just repeat the process by clicking on New Guides and creating each line.

5. The Background: After you have your guides in place, you are ready to click and drag the background image to the canvas. Don’t worry about the image proportions because the next step will fix them.

6. Click Control-T and hold down Shift to drag the corner to adjust the image to background size. At this point, you might lighten this image by clicking on the Opacity slider of the background image.

7. Add Images: Bring the next image to the canvas. This will be your first inserted image into the background image, and here’s where the fun begins. Sizes and configurations are endless. No two brides need ever have the same look to their book and photographers are forever free of boring mats. Repeat the same steps as above for each one of the images you wish to place into the background image.

8. Make Your Borders: To enhance the images and add stylish touches to the overall page design, now go to Layers > Layer Style.

9. Design Your Borders: You will find many different design options with which to border each of the smaller images on your canvas. On the layers palette, highlight the first layer containing the image you want to border. Kevin is fond of Inner Line and Stroke. With Stroke you can measure the width of the border, and if you click on Color, you get a little eyedropper (the color picker), touch it to the background image, and it will pull a selected color directly out of that image. This is the color your borders will then become.

10. Add a border to each image: Just highlight the pertinent layer containing the bordered image, and Right-click (Ctrl-click on a Mac). You will see the command “Copy Layer Style.” Right-click it, and then highlight an image you have not yet bordered and Right-click again. This time you will click on the command “Paste Layer Style.” Repeat for each image you wish to border, and like magic, the borders appear around all the little images on the background image.

Once these 10 Steps have been accomplished, just save the PSD file. Then flatten it, and save it as a JPEG. Ship it to the lab as two (10x10) prints or as one (10x20)—or just press “Print.”

You can email Kevin at kj@kjimages .com to discuss pano pages, wedding photography in general, or tropical fish—a passion of his.

CharMaine Beleele, with an MA in Communication, owns Angel Kissed Photography Studio in Arkansas. She teaches Communication at the University of Arkansas in Fort Smith. She is also a regular correspondent for the Arkansas Catholic newspaper. You can email her at photoangels@sbcglobal.com or her web site: www.angelkissedphotography.com/.