StudioLabLink Instructions

General Layout

Upon your first starting of StudioLabLink (SLL), you will be presented with a dialog box to enter some of your information into. The most important of these is your email address and also your K&K account number. Also, remember that the name field is there for your studio business name.

After you have entered your information and clicked OK, you will be at the main interface of SLL. It is divided down the middle into two parts. On the right side is where SLL will display thumbnails of the images that you are going to be ordering from. You can fill the area with thumbnails by clicking on the Folders buttons at the bottom of the pane and browse to a folder containing images. By opening a folder and then double-clicking on an image, SLL will begin to create the thumbnails of all the images in the folder and displaying them in the pane.

This brings us to the left side of the interface, the half where you will be ordering your prints. This side has a lot more buttons and functions than the other side. The top of this pane is where you will preview and crop your image inside of a blue outlined box with the size of the print to be ordered directly beneath it.

Underneath this pane are some buttons. Starting with the buttons that are immediately below the preview pane, they are Rotate Layout, a slider bar for zooming in to crop your images and Rotate Image which also has a smaller button if a 90 degree rotation is not quite what you need.

Below these are some option buttons. From the left you have Hold Crop, then there is Hold Options, Hold Quantity, Hold Image, Lock Images, Crop/Fit, Auto Rotate, and finally a button that will display a reticle on the preview area. The option is active if a small lock appears in the lower corner of the button. These will be explained in further detail later. These buttons can also be hidden by de-selecting the Pro Tool Layout option under your Preferences.

The next line of buttons are the ones you are going to use the most. The first is the Sizes button which is where you will select the size of print you are going to be ordering. The next is Options which contains all of the options that are available for that particular print size. Finally there is a text field for the quantity of prints that you need to order of a particular size and a button to add the specified print to an order.

Some Finer Points

One thing you will notice as you are browsing through our offerings is the layout of the products we offer. When you click the Sizes button, you are presented with some menus and an option to Show the sizes pallet. Clicking this will cause a new dialog box to open that gives a visual representation of print sizes you can order. There are also tabs for various offerings.

The upper most tabs you will see are Color Prints and Black & White Prints. The difference in these is the images you are going to order from. If you are ordering prints from color images, you will use the products under the Color Prints tab. If, however, you are ordering from a digital file that you have desaturated to black and white, then you will need to order everything from that image using the products under the Black & White Prints tab. This helps to ensure that we can offer you the best black and white we are capable of printing. Prints ordered from these products are printed with some slightly different color corrections in the lab to help ensure a good, consistent black and white image. Also it is a good idea to order any images that are either a mixture of color and black and white, or a sepia toned image from the black and white products.

Immediately under these two tabs the pane is divided into two parts. The right part is products offered from 12x18 down to 3.5x5. On the top of the left pane are more tabs which contain product offerings that are alike and have been separated from the general prints. There are three that are of the most importance: Wallets, Wall Portraits, and Composites. They contain all of our wallet offerings, print sizes 16x20 and up and multi-image wall portraits that you can order through SLL respectively.

At the bottom of the Sizes Pallet dialog box is a button labeled Catalogs. Clicking it gives you a further choice of Digital Prints, Album & Page Templates, Digital Proofs and Greeting Cards. Each catalog is a grouping of similar products. The names are representative of what is found in them. Each catalog is mutually exclusive, meaning that to order things from the Digital Prints catalog and the Digital Proofs catalog will require you to submit two separate order, one from each catalog.

All of these things can also be found under the Sizes button. Under it however, you will find everything through a series of menu and sub-menus instead of tabs and icons. Ordering from the menu or from the pallet is no different and is entirely up to your preference.

Another thing to remember is to make sure that you are online at least once a week when you first launch SLL if you are not using a connection that is always on, like cable or some DSL lines. We are constantly updating the catalog with new additions and fixes, so keeping updated helps you to have any new features we have added. Additionally, SLL will force you to go online if your catalog is more than two weeks old, as a reminder.

Ordering

After you have gotten all of your thumbnails, as described above, and are ready to order, begin by selecting a print size by clicking on the Sizes button and scrolling to the size you would like and clicking on it. This will change the product in the preview pane to the correct item, which can be seen by the size showing beneath the preview. Next, either click and drag an image or double click on it to get it into the preview pane.

When you mouse-over the preview pane with an image in it your cursor becomes a hand that allows you to click and drag the image around in the bow to crop it exactly how you want it. Also, if you need to rotate the layout or the image you can do so by clicking on the appropriate button. Using the zoom tool and dragging the image to where you need it, you can crop out unnecessary or unwanted parts of the image. You do not need to create multiple copies of the same image for each image size you are going to be ordering. SLL only needs one version and then communicates cropping instructions to our printing software, eliminating any need for you to custom crop the image multiple times and create multiple versions of the same image.

If options such as mounting, spraying or round cornering of wallets are wanted, you can select them under the Options button. Next, enter the quantity of this print that you want, 1, 2 or 100, and click Add to Order. After you have ordered all of the images you need, begin the order completion by clicking on the Review Order button.

Once clicked, you will be presented with a list of the prints and their options that you have ordered and a small thumbnail to accompany them to check cropping. If you need to change an order here you can double-click on it to bring you back to the preview pane and make cropping or option changes as necessary. Make sure to save your changes with the Save Changes button that is now in the place of the Add to Order button. You can also remove an ordered item by changing it's quantity to zero and hitting the Enter key.

An option that a lot of photographers have found to be of great use is the ability to add a reference such as an event or client name to the order. You can accomplish this using the Studio Reference text entry field. There is also a Special Instuctions button if you need to add any special instructions to the order. Special instructions would include things you needed to communicate to the lab such a special due date or custom color correction instructions. Once you filled in these boxes, click the Complete Order button to finalize the order for submission to the lab.

After clicking Complete Order a dialog box with three options will appear. The first is to send the order immediately over the internet to the lab, which will zip everything together and send it to us right then. The next is to zip the order up and place it into a queue for SLL to send at a later time, which you can designate. This is especially helpful if you need to create more than one order and would like to send them all at once. The final option is to zip the files up so that you can burn them to a CD and mail or drop them off at the lab. This is for people who do not have a high speed internet connection.

If you have queued orders for sending them at a later time you can accomplish this in one of three ways. First, you can simply launch the application, which will bring up a dialog box asking if you would like to send the orders that are queued. You can also view this dialog box by clicking Save&Open->Show Queued Orders. At the bottom of this box is a Send All button. Clicking this will send all of the order files listed in the queue immediately.

Alternately, there is a Settings button at the bottom of the Queued Orders dialog box. If you click it a new one will appear labeled Settings. There is check box which when selected will allow you to designate a time when SLL will automatically send all of the orders in the queue. For the transfer to happen, SLL has to be open, so you will need to leave you computer on and SLL running.

However you send in your order, either on a CD/DVD or over the internet, when we receive the order we will begin to print it. You can expect any order that you create with prints 12x18 and smaller to be ready for you in 72 hours. Larger sizes and finishing services can add some time, so plan accordingly.

Order Status

After you have submitted you order and we begin to process it, we will send you an email which contains the order number and a brief synopsis of what you ordered. You can use the order number to go online at kkstudioconnect.com to check the status of your order. You'll need to have signed up for a StudioConnect account, once logged in click the large purple button that says "LabLink". The order's status will be updated as it moves from printing, to quality control, to finishing if any, and finally to completed.

Tricks and Tips

If you need to order a large number of the same size, such as to proof a wedding, get the product set up on the left side, size, quantity, options, etc, and then select all of the images from the thumbnails you need to order and drag them over the product. You can select large numbers of images by either clicking on the first one and then holding down Shift and clicking on the last one to highlight all of them in between, or by holding down Ctrl (or Command for a Mac) and selectively clicking on images. SLL will ask you if you want to add the large number of products to the order. One thing to note before doing this is to turn ON auto-rotate or SLL will crop your images to whatever orientation the product is set up as.

Online at kkcolorlab.com you can also find some actions for Photoshop that can be helpful to you. One that can be very useful is an action that will size your images down if you are planning to proof out a large order. This can help to greatly speed up your transfer times by reducing the size of the file you upload to us without noticeable effects on the final prints.

LabLink orders have a max size limit of 4 gigs (4096 megs).

If you have any questions about SLL feel free to send an email to manager@kkcolorlab.com. For technical issues email support@kkcolorlab.com.

Option and Preferences Description

Buttons

Thumbnail (Right) Pane

Zoom: Allows you to make the thumbnails larger or smaller.
Folder: Open dialog box to browse images for ordering.
Arrow Down: Lists recently open folders.

Preview (Left) Pane

Rotate Layout: Rotates the products layout 90 degrees counter-clockwise. Alt or OPT click will rotate 90 degrees clockwise.
Zoom: Zooms in or out to crop the image.
Rotate Image: Rotate the image in the layout 90 degrees counter-clockwise. Alt or OPT will rotate the image 90 degrees clockwise.
Down Arrow: Open a slider bar for a image rotation finer than 90 degrees.
Hold Crop: Preserves the crop when an image of the same size is dragged into a layout.
Hold Options: Preserves options across size/image changes.
Hold Quantity: Preserves the quantity across size/image changes.
Lock Images: Not utilized.
Crop/Fit: Toggle whether an image dragged into the cropping pane will either be cropped to fill the entire pane or the entire image will be fit into the pane.
Auto Rotate: The layout or image will Auto Rotate when the orientations do not match.
Reticle: Displays a reticle over the image in the layout as a cropping guide.

Preferences

Search enclosed folders: Searches folders inside of a selected folder for images to generate thumbnails from.
Show image thumbnails: Whether to show thumbnails for the images or just file names.
Mark ordered thumbnails: Places a blue border around thumbnails of images that have been ordered.
Show queue window when sending: Displays a dialog box as orders are sent. Unchecking will cause orders to be sent without a visual representation.
Show banner: Displays the banner containing our logo across the top of the window.
Show prices: Toggles the display of prices under the Sizes button.
Use pro tool layout: Toggles the options to either be buttons on the main screen or check boxes under the preferences.
Auto rotate affects print size instead of images: Causes SLL to Auto Rotate the layout instead of the image when they are not the same orientation when Auto Rotate is selected.
When auto rotating, do so counterclockwise: SLL will auto rotate clockwise rather than counter-clockwise when auto rotating.
Days the back up ordered: Number of days SLL will store a backup of a submitted order.
Image Application: Path to an image editing application, such as Photoshop. This allows for you to right-click on a thumbnail and open it directly into an application for editing.

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