Review: Fundy Designer v11 and Design Wizard

Over the years, Fundy Designer has consistently prioritized efficiency and creativity. While that may sound like an odd pairing, efficient design options give users the time to think creatively about photography projects. Fundy Designer takes the technical, decision-laden nature of designing products and simplifies it so you can spend more time doing what you love. With the release of version 11, Fundy Designer has managed to make a great design and sales tool even more effective and useful for photographers.

With v11, the first thing you’ll notice is that Intelligent Retouch is now an option you can apply to your images upon import. Rather than having to go in and manually batch-apply skin retouching after import, you can set it to happen right as they come in.

The other major addition to Fundy Designer is the automated Design Wizard, which you can use on import or at any point later in the process. With the Design Wizard you can quickly create designs for your client before their ordering appointment, or you can use it after your client has selected their favorites during the ordering process and be able to show them something right away that includes just the images they love and want to buy.

The Design Wizard is available for albums, wall art, and cards. I’ll cover each separately, since there are some different features. With any of the end products, you can use different filters, such as your 5-star rated images, to design numerous room layouts, albums, or cards in just one click. Ratings from Lightroom are recognized too.

If you’re selling wall art collections, you can take a set of your favorite images or your client’s top picks and show them what different wall arrangements might look like in different rooms. This showcases the concept of wall collections and gives you an opportunity to upsell a set of images rather than just one for your client to display and enjoy in their home.

If albums are your focus, you can have Fundy Designer automatically create an entire album design for you as well, and with v11 you have a lot more input as to how the spreads will be designed than in previous versions. Before starting the auto-design, you can prepare the images in thumbnail view: Select an image to use for the cover, group photos together to ensure they will display on the same spread, and even select specific images to be displayed as panoramas. Using these options enables you spend a lot less time revising the automated design. Fundy lets you to revise the design as desired, but this new Design Wizard takes efficiency to the next level with your preferences incorporated into the automatic design.

Design Wizard also automates the creation of customized cards. Keep in mind, all the designs created by the Design Wizard are completely customizable, just as your own manual design would be, but overall the automation saves you time.

V11 Fundy Designer has also included improvements such as increased processing speed for importing and the ability to select a whole folder of images rather than navigating into the folder and selecting the images within. Version 11 also includes new drop zones with dynamic cropping, multi-design online proofing options with slideshows, the social design mobile app that automates design of stories/carousels, access to their Design Library of templates, music, assets, etc., and the one-click skin retouching mentioned earlier.

As always, Fundy Designer is a proven, solid software tool for photographers. Whether you do in-person sales or online proofing, Fundy’s offerings assist you in making more sales, more efficiently. I’ve used multiple proofing and ordering software applications over the years, and Fundy Designer is worth the investment. I’ve found it easy to use during ordering appointments, and even though I don’t need all of the features, it’s nice to know they’re available.

The one feature I’d like to see that Fundy Designer doesn’t have is the ability to do online proofing galleries for individual images. But then again, it’s more of a product sales tool, so I can appreciate that they’ve chosen to focus on online proofing for albums, wall designs, and cards rather than a la carte image sales.

When it comes to designing products for your clients, Fundy Designer is a no-brainer. Fundy Designer works with Mac and Windows systems and is available for annual lease for $36/month or $218/year as well as for purchase. Leased options include Pro Enhancements; if you purchase the software you’ll need to subscribe to Pro Enhancements for an additional fee for $189/year after three months. You can purchase the Pro Suite for $397 or the Album Suite for $322. The Pro Suite includes everything except Pro Enhancements, while the Album Suite also excludes Wall Art. For more information, or to download the free trial, visit www.fundydesigner.com.

Betsy Finn is a portrait artist in Dexter, Michigan.