Alastair, As most have said there are plenty of template programs - YSI, Photojunction, Fundy, and the proprietary ones you get from SIM2000 and Albums Australia. For matted albums it is less of an issue because you are slightly more limited in the design due to the spacing required for intra-image mats on a multi-image page. You are going to be limited in design and certainly when I was with Albums Australia I did have a large set of personally designed templates - I did use them again and again but each album was unique - because I rarely just slapped the same templates on the same pages. I also tried to design a new page layout for each album but as I said eventually you run out of possibilities. For digital/storybook albums where an A4/35x25/A3 page is an entire canvas for you to work with then again it is possible to drop into the routine of standard, simple, images in a grid designs as you might see in a matted album. Assuming you don't go for the dated design of a low saturation image as a background with images placed on top in a grid then there are some really sophisticated things you can do to make your designs stand out amongst other photographers. My style was taught to me by David A Williams, and I used it as a selling point until I decided to stop shooting weddings two years ago. It was attracting more visually or design literate clients - creatives, dancers, architects - than I had in the past where I was typically working with doctors, lawyers, teachers, military, IT professionals who also responded well to them but I would say tended to be more comfortable with the matted albums. I did all of mine in PS and again whilst there were some standard layouts I found that by creating each page based on the images themselves, the natural lines running through them, and the multitude of ways you can run images together, spaced apart, or in combination with graphic elements meant that you could build really striking unique albums. It certainly isn't the fastest way to build a design, but it depends what you want from your business. I do think David moved to Fundy about a year after I had spent time with him, and I have others friends who also use it. I evaluated it and would have invested had I not made the decision to move away from weddings. My portrait books are all designed in PS - and tend to be simpler and smaller in size. It might be worth really giving Fundy a good workout to see if you can see the benefits - everything is complicated, even photojunction until you get used to it.
