Wedding Albums 101: Matted vs. Flush-mount

Wedding albums can come in all different shapes and sizes, with different types of cover material. The bigger the album, the higher the price. Likewise, you'll pay a premium for a leather-covered album. 

However, the inside is the most important! There are two distinct types of album layouts, matted and flush-mount. 

Matted

In a matted album, photographs are printed and hand-mounted to a matte (or border) on the page. The borders can be a variety of colors but are usually metallic gold, silver, pewter, copper, and sometimes black or white. Pictures can be in full or half panorama and are each their own separate picture. This is the more traditional type of album.

Flush-mount

With flush-mount, the entire photo-layouts are mounted to cardstock (so pictures are not printed individually). Photos can be overlayed, and many more can fit on a page. This opens up the opportunity for interesting designs and collages. The pictures stretch to the end of the "board" or page, and thus don't have any borders or edges. If you want to optimize the number of pictures in your album, this is your album!

What are Jon and I doing?

A hybrid! I prefer matted, because a lot of times I think the collages (that are the heart and soul of flush-mount) can get a little busy. I like simple elegance, and I want each picture to be distinct and noticeable. BUT, that being said -- flush-mount gives you the opportunity to mount a picture the whole length of two pages, which really makes it pop (they also make these seamless, so no dark crease in the middle cutting the picture in half -- see above). The center page of my album will be flush-mount; I want to have a huge panorama shot of the entire bridal/groom party with Jon and I. I think it will look gorgeous and really show off our colors and the essence of the day. I am still considering doing flush-mount pages at the front and back of the book -- but as for the rest of the flush-mount incorporation, I will be relying on advice from my photographer.

An example of a full 2-page spread in the center of the album.

I want this but a bridal party picture -- it would look stunning!

This is an example of a flush-mount page that I like. 

The ones I showed above are far too busy for me,

but this one was still done very cleanly (I guess I'm not into overlays).