• ColorFlow. ColorFlow is a new workflow management system that gives labs complete control over photo processing.  ColorFlow is designed to be flexible so that it can work with any third party color correction station or software, including minilabs and PJP.  As online and kiosk orders are harvested, ColorFlow applies the rules set up for your operation to decide which photos should be sent out for correction.  ColorFlow then monitors for completion of the job and pulls the corrected photos back into Lab 50 to resume the fulfillment pipeline – rendering creative products and exporting to printers and other output devices.  ColorFlow offers tremendous customizability, allowing labs to configure different workflows for different product types or different order sources.  For example, a manual review and retouch workflow could be set up for premium photo book products, while all other photo books are sent through an auto-enhancement station. (Documentation)
• APM Render @ Lab 50.  In combination with the APM 8.0, Lab 50 supports rendering folio products from APM kiosks.  This not only cuts the time a customer is held waiting for their order to submit on the kiosk by up to 90%, but also enables the full range of fulfillment processing options in Lab 50 – manual photo edits, built-in auto photo enhancement, full 3^rd-party color correction via ColorFlow, text edits, typo corrections and more.


Advanced Invoice Printing

• Advanced Invoice Printing.  Lab 50’s Advanced Invoice Settings allow you to configure multiple separate invoices types.  These invoices can be printed on-demand for a given order, or configured to print automatically as orders are processed with various criteria.  Configuration options include the ability to select a specific printer for a given invoice, to print multiple copies, to adjust the margins, and to choose which orders the invoice should be auto-printed for.  For example the Advance Invoice system could be configured to automatically print a standard invoice on your office laser printer for each order, and also print a mailing label on a Dymo label printer for orders that need to be shipped.
• Order Rerouting.  It is now possible to re-route an entire order or specific items from within an order to a different store within your chain.  Simply right-click on the order itself, or one of the items in the Details list, and select “Re-route” then choose from the list of available store locations.
• FolioServer Performance.  FolioServer rendering times have been improved by up to 75% over version 7.5.

Other Features & Fixes:

Printing & Fulfillment

• Dealers with sub-accounts can once again print all orders directly from their primary account.


Add Borders Option

• Support for printing bordered prints from the web.  Borders is an order option that can be offered to customers on your site’s checkout page.  The Borders option can be enabled for your site in Store Manager > Application Settings > Ordering.
• New option on the Print dialog to “Show Hidden Order Items” which allows a Lab 50 station to print items that are not currently available to it, based on its order filtering settings.
• Support for rendering and printing creative products from the web with folio borders.
• Support for printing “Fit-to-Page” web orders. (This feature will be launched online shortly.)
• New <retailer> tag in the order XML with details on the originating retail site to facilitate fulfillment by 3rd parties.
• Improvements for “Unable to save” errors after printing.  Order status updates back to the server now employ an advanced connection retry logic.
• Fixed the <payment> tag in the order XML so that it correctly reflects whether an order was paid online. This is important for dealers who use Lab 50 as a front-end to their own fulfillment systems.
• Fixed an issue that would cause the last page (the back) of 5×7 Folded Cards to be flipped when printed on the Noritsu D502 and D1005 printers.

Invoice Printing

• Two new invoices are included with Lab 50 – “Product Label” and “Shipping Label”.  Shipping Label is a template for a mailing label to print on mail orders, containing the customer’s address and dealer return address.  The Product Label is designed as a small label sticker for an order box or envelope, and includes the customer’s name and basic details.
• Newly added !PAPER_SURFACE! macro that outputs “Glossy” or “Matte”.
• The !COMPANY! invoice macros now work correctly.

Discount & Promotions

• Support for setting exact start and end times for promotions and coupons, rather than being locked into midnight Eastern Time.
• Product discounts are no longer limited to quantities of 100 or fewer.

Payment

• Lab 50 and Photo Finale now support PayPal, offering online payment processing in over 190 markets.  Contact your account representative for additional setup information.
• The new “Auto-Charge” system allows you to forget about having to manually charge each order.  Each night, any orders that have been printed or completed in the previous day will be captured and settled with your payment provider automatically.  Auto-Charge can be enabled in the Account Management screen, under the Payment Processing tab.
• New “Authorize & Capture” option for online payments will not only authorize the charge at the time of order, but also go ahead and capture payment as well.  This option is particularly recommend for retailers that offer PayPal payment, because PayPal does not guarantee funds.

Product Catalog

Category Options

• The Category Options screen (accessible by right-clicking on a category in your product catalog and selecting “Options…”) will now show an improved, SEO-friendly Direct URL.  These URLs can be used for links from your corporate site, emails, newsletters, online ads, etc.  The URL will also now work for print categories, and even takes into account dealers with custom domain names other than Photo Finale.

Reporting

• The Reports screen ties into an updated reporting engine powered by SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 R2.
• New “Daily Online Sales Summary” report, showing the past month’s online sales, day-by-day, with discounts broken out.
• Improvements to the “Order Sales (Detailed)” report — separated columns for subtotal, discount, tax, shipping and total.

Orders Screen

Orders Screen

• Right-clicking on a photo in the Photos list for an order will offer new options to show the original file in Windows Explorer and to copy the online URL of the photo to the clipboard.
• New setting added in the More Options tab of the Filter Options dialog to automatically exclude free membership signups from the Orders screen.  (This setting will not apply to free memberships which include an award of print credits, to allow operators to monitor for fraud.)
• Orders that consist of only products fulfilled by a supplier will now be shown in the retailer’s Lab 50 for tracking purposes.

Members Screen

• The members screen search feature has been greatly improved.  Operators can quickly search for customers and members using the following fields: First Name, Last Name, Email, Company,  Customer Number, and Nickname.
• The member details screen now accepts international phone number formats.

Email Communications

• New macros are available for the Order Received, Order Printed and Order Ready for Pickup email events — {%store_name%}, {%store_number%}, {%store_phone%}, {%store_address%} and {%store_hours%}.

Languages

• The Languages store management screen has been removed.  All Photo Finale sites now offer the full array of consumer languages available.  The current list includes English, Spanish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Japanese.

I’m ready! Download Lab 50 8.0

• PicMonkey.  We’ve added a 2nd photo editing option!  PicMonkey is an offshoot from a few former Picnik employees.  The two editors complement each other well.  While Aviary is incredibly easy and fast for quick edits (auto-corrects, red-eye, popular filters, cropping, etc.), PicMonkey offers a wide array of creative and advanced options that were available in Picnik.
• Saving Projects.  Update to the project update process to prevent issues experienced by some customers of their most recent “saves” not being recorded.
• Project Rendering.  Improvements to cases where after zooming/panning a photo the rendered output would occasionally not exactly match the in-browser display.
• Additional Page Pricing.  Additional page pricing now works correctly with photo books that have price tiers set.
• Image Unavailable.  Fixed missing thumbnails (replaced by “Image Unavailable”) for some customers.  (Original photos were intact.)
• Aviary.  Fixed a refresh problem affecting guest users who chose to “replace” a photo in Aviary.
• Shift-Select.  Fixed a problem where using the shift-key to select a range of photos would intermittently skip some photos, if used immediately following a photo upload session.

• New photo editor.  Aviary replaces Picnik (which will close this week) as our new photo editor.  It’s incredibly fast to load and great for quick edits.  Aviary is available in French, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.  (Is Aviary missing your favorite Picnik feature?…they are ever-improving the tools and are open to feature suggestions!  Just click the arrow to the right of the tool list and click through to their user forum and voice your opinion or vote for suggestions made by other users.)
• Italian is now available as a language choice on Photo Finale.  (Full list: English, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian)
• Fix for additional page pricing on photo books and other variable-page products.
• We have made improvements to photo spot resizing and rotating.
• Fixed an issue where some project changes were not being saved, especially after adding new photo or text spots.
• Added a message panel to the My Projects page to inform guest users that their projects would be better secured if they become a member.
• Product credits are now being added and subtracted from accounts properly.
• Fixed an issue where the order confirmation number was not visible for some browsers.
• Fixed a problem where creative categories containing disabled products would result in a blank page for that category on the site.
• Fixed an issue where auto-filling from previously uploaded collection used only one photo.
• Added a “No additional layouts” message when a project page only has a single layout available.
• Resolved a problem that would display an error message when a user tried to renew their membership.
• Fixed a bug that prevent users font color changes from being saved if the page was using one of a small number of specific folio backgrounds.
• The Share button is now disabled for private collections.

Go to: Marketing Kits

Totally Revamped Creative Product Builder:

• Gorgeous new UI design

• New editing controls to make it easier to move, resize, rotate and pan photos and text

• Ability to dynamically add photo and text spots to pages

• Z-order control for photos (bring forward / send backward)

• New “Page” view mode for duplexed products that zooms in on a single page of a spread for easier editing

• Photo borders with adjustable width and color

• Support for nudging photo-spots using the keyboard arrow keys
• Larger default product view for single-page products
• Better default font formatting (larger size, centered horizontally & vertically)
• Larger range of font sizes (10 – 192) and more precise control for small adjustments
• The photo-spot and text-spot toolbars are no longer rotated or magnified when the page is zoomed or their object rotated
• Option to delete a project when existing the Product Builder
• Faster loading while browsing the product selection pages

Faster Order Submission: The wait time for a user between hitting “Place Order” and getting their order confirmation has been shortened by up to 90%.

New Language: Spanish. ¡Hola! (Coming soon… Italiano)

New URL Options (for improved SEO and direct product linking):

• Direct-link to a specific print product category (e.g. http://demo.photofinale.com/prints/large-format)
• Direct-link to a specific shop-by-occasion category (e.g. http://demo.photofinale.com/shop/occasions/birthday)
• Direct-link to a specific product/style combination (e.g. http://demo.photofinale.com/shop.aspx?pid=408584&styleID=3321092)

Quantity Pricing Upsells: Creative products offering quantity pricing will now show the user how much they’re saving and prompt them with the quantity needed to reach the next tier.

Currency Formatting:  All formatting and display of pricing on the site now abides by the retailer’s selected currency, rather than the currency of the language the user is viewing the site in.

Fixes & Tweaks:

• Paid membership plans can be purchased again
• Updated French, Swedish and Finnish localizations
• Timestamps shown in the My Projects, Order History, and Photo Viewer pages now use the proper formatting of the user’s locale
• Improved browser caching to prevent issue where users get a blank page because of their browser’s attempt to load an outdated Silverlight file
• The Black photo book now defaults text spots to white text
• Additional user data variables (firstName, lastName, email, dateCreated, nickname) are exposed to Photo Finale Enterprise customers through the PF object
• The Shopping Cart shipping warning, “One or more products in your order require additional processing time…”, will no longer show up for dealers unless actively enabled
• Improved SEO indexing for search engine bots (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.)
• Fixes for error messages related to project pages without layouts set

Photo Finale 8.1.0.25300 Release •  27 January 2012

New Features/Improvements:

• New “My Projects” page with support for customer-entered names and descriptions per-project, and a Copy Project feature.
• Redesigned “Review Your Photos” page, focuses customer on only photos that require cropping, allows for filtering by status, product and orientation, and supports thumbnail zooming.
• Revamped Photo Browser & Photo Viewer pages with a cleaner, sleeker look and feel, better consistency throughout, and improved load speeds for accounts with many collections.
• Improvements to the Style Selection page to load style preview thumbnails faster and adjust the workflow so customers always see a full-size preview of their style before selecting it.
• All text fields in creative products are now free-form, allowing them to be resized and repositioned as need by the customer.
• Support for drag and drop in the Upload Photos dialog.
• Automatic redirection of iPhone/ iPad / iPod Touch users to the iTunes App Store for dealers with a custom-branded Pocket Pics app.
• New infrastructure to allow Folio Content changes (uploading updates to existing styles) that remove previously linked backgrounds and/or layouts, while still preserving the items for customers with saved projects utilizing them.
• Labs utilizing online payment processing can now choose between Deferred Capture, the existing method where payments are “authorized” when the customer submits their order online and captured later after fulfillment, or a new Authorize & Capture method that captures the payment immediately as the order is placed.
• A number of smaller fixes and tweaks.

Jumbo Card

The APM and Photo Finale have a ton of Valentine’s and Romance themed cards, books and scrapbook pages. Whether customers are looking for simple cards for the kid’s whole class or a jumbo card (aka scrapbook page) with custom poem…let them know you have it!

Encourage them to SEND LOVE this February 14th with our Valentine’s Day kit! A cute SEND LOVE pink envelope poster and hearts in holiday colors to scatter about are included in this kit. Also included are kiosk orders for scrapbook pages, flat cards and notepads to help inspire your customers to create the perfect valentine.

Download the artwork and orders here: http://www.lucidiom.com/support/tools_kits.aspx.

1. Order Valentine’s 4x6s for their kids’ whole class?
2. Make a custom folded card?
3. Create a 12×12 jumbo card?
4. Wow their sweetie with a sentimental scrapbook page?
5. Print up a big banner, proclaiming their undying love and affection!
6. Whip up a 12-month calendar that starts in February or March
7. Make a sappy book filled with sweet nothings about their sweetheart…

Ok, so ANYTHING can make a cute, creative and one-of-a-kind Valentine’s day gift. You have a leg up on the pre-printed card market, because nothing screams, or maybe whispers, sentimentality like a personalized note. Print out those samples, get them up on the walls and counters, and make some Valentine’s sales goals for your staff.

Customers will need help with words…print up some quotes to inspire them (or for them to copy!)

Sample folded cards, 4×6 and 5×7 flat cards and 12×12 scrapbook pages (also PERFECT for a love poem, or as a jumbo card!) are available for download at www.lucidiom.com/marketing.

One-of-a-Kind Valentine's Day Cards

Advertise your products, inspire your customers and give them something new to look at every time they come in! Our marketing pages have lots of free, downloadable artwork in layered and print-ready formats to help get you started. Many kits not only have posters, but bag stuffers, coordinating sample orders to print and display ideas.

Click here to visit the Marketing Tools section on lucidiom.com.