Learning Lightroom 3: Photo Books. Slideshows, Maps and More

1. Introduction to the Finishing Modules of Adobe Lightroom: Hey, guys, I'm David Miller and welcome to this class on lightens finishing modules. This is the third in a series of learning light room classes on the Culture Channel. So if this is the 1st 1 you're watching, then feel free to check out my part one, which is on the library module and Part C, which about development module The finishing modules encapsulate its the maps, the book, the slide show and, briefly, the Web modules of Light Room and the's are the modules that people generally spend the least amount of time in. But they're still pretty powerful, and they're still pretty important. When I went to college, we shot our film. We developed it in chemistry. We went in the dark when we printed it, and then we had to mount our Fillmore presented portfolio. But we had to finish the work in some way, and I feel like this is an art that is being lost in modern photography. People take the picture with their camera. They might play with a little bit, and then sharing has become the new finishing. But sharing really is just a throwing it on the Internet and not having any context that maybe this photo is part of a Siri's or that this photo should be looked at in a certain sequence. If you are on instagram, you know you're sequences. Just photo photo photo from a variety of people. It's totally random. There's no curation. There's no placement in a book. There's no sense of its location. If people don't geo tag it on. All of these things are very important. So that is why we spend time finishing modules of Adobe like your product for this class is a pretty fun one. You're going to create a PdF of a series of photos. You can do this with the book module or the life. You can do this with the book module or the slideshow module, and I want you to put that presentation somewhere on the Internet, link it to your skill share product page. So we want to see your photos presented in an order that is going to tell a story, and if it has text or any other annotations to it that make us understand and appreciate the work better than I really want you to do that. So that is your product for this class. At this point, you're just gonna need light room and instead of images, so let's get started. 2. Map Module: Now we're going to talk about the finalization modules. So the map module is very similar to Google Earth, and you will need Internet access to have this function. What the map module does is reverse geo tag the images you take, associating GPS coordinates with your photo so location data is essential in travel in journalism, but it can be useful in other scenarios. For example, certain locations may end up yielding best results with your style of photography, and the data from geo tagging images can help inform that. Also, many websites include geo tagging information, which may help people find your work. For example, a website I used to use called Panorama neo dot com or instagram as your library grows, it is very simple to forget where you shot photos, so geo tagging helps in keeping track of the image data. To use this function, we're going to type of location into the search bar, and then the photos in the filmstrip that are associated with this location. We're simply going to drag them onto the flag that is planted. This is very easy to do if you are picking a location that has a name for example, the Phoenix Zoo. But if you shot these photos in a location that has no name and you're kind of guesstimating Ah, one way that you can synchronize accurate GPS data is to take a picture with your phone while you are taking pictures with your DSLR or Marylise camera that will automatically place a GPS coordinate on the image you shot. If you have location services turned on, then you can synchronize the location from your cell phone image to all the other ones on the filmstrip, and you will have accurate coordinates placed. The majority of my photographs are not location specific because I focus on art photography , but I can guarantee that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of instances where I wished that I had Geo tagged a location because I wanted to return to it and couldn't figure it out because years had passed, and I did not remember exactly where I shot these earlier images. So I highly recommend making the map module part of your workflow or at the bare minimum, taking a cell phone picture with location services turned on at the same time as you take all your other DSLR or mere list camera shots 3. Book Module Pt 1: we are ready to delve into the book module, and I've already created collection. It's called In Stacks. Her book project. This is a Siris of instant film shots that I thought I would like to assemble in book format. Just because I have these in a collection does not mean they need to be used for the book. It's just a way of organizing my thoughts. Also, as we've addressed in other lessons, once you go over to anything but the library module, you only have access to your collections. You don't have access to your actual folders, so go over the book and it's automatically filled all my pages already. Of course, we have a lot of problems here, the way it's set up one. I haven't designed anything. It's just randomly filled all the pages. So the first thing I'm going to do is clear this out under auto lay out clear layout and we're back to square one. Before we start assembling her book, we really need to think about the actual format of it, and I want to explain what the book actually makes. It corresponds to a company called Blurb. If you are going to genuinely want to print this book out straight from the light room application. If you want to make a PdF or a series of J pegs, you have those options. I'm going to go ahead and leave it on blurb because we can always change it to a pdf after the fact. But the choices that blurb has are standard landscape, small square portrait, large landscape and large square. Because my photos are generally in the portrait format there, up and down, I'm going to switch it to Standard Portrait, and then we have some cover options. Dust jackets, image rap on a hardcover, a soft cover self Publishing a book is fairly expensive. It's very hard to get a return on your investment. So unless you are guaranteed some buyers, it's best to keep your costs down as low as you can. I'm going to choose soft cover and paper type. I always like luster myself. When you have all your pages loaded, you'll see an estimated price. Estimated price starts at $25 that's fairly high for what's essentially a short run book publishing option. If you were interested in self publishing, but at a lower cost blurb actually has an option that's not listed here, and that is called a trade book, so you can create the pdf and exported to blurbs website and order the trade books those air printed on much less fancy paper. But it is an option, and you know there are many local printer options that are available to you. I encourage you to explore all of those, but you can create the actual book format in light room export as a PdF. For now, we're going to stick with the blurb print option. At this point, I look at my images. I decides which ones are going to get pages and which ones might be the covers and which ones I might not use at all. I'll go ahead and select. This is the cover double click to make it large. If you want to go back to that full layout, look, that's this option. And if you want to look at things as double page spreads, it's this option. So single image spread all the pages. Your option to add text appears here. If you don't add text, this will be a pure image. This thing that says. Add photo text won't SHOW UP on your book. My call it in Stacks 2017 course. It's all tiny and you can't see it. So if you scroll down, here's your text options when highlight my text. Of course, if you don't have your text highlighted than you font and size choices and color choices don't show any font you download and keep on your computer will show up here. That's why I have quite a few font choices that aren't standard. I'm gonna go ahead and pick Attic now. When we choose our page, we have a little drop down menu that's really tiny here, but it's there, and it shows you various page options. You have ones where a body of text might be below a photo. A body of text might be above a photo. You have options where you have two photos side by side text, above and below. You have a grid photo layout. You also have a drop down menu within the text caption itself. Photo caption. Custom text. If you have already captured your photos in the library module, then this would automatically fill in that tech space with what you have 4. Book Module Pt 2: So once we have our cover, we can move on to the interior pages. Any time you need to add a new page, I would switch to this view and up here we have a drop down menu that's page add page. Add blank blank pages. Don't give you the option to place a photo or text, but you can easily change it from a blank to something else. If you go into this drop down menu, pick how many photos you want, where you want them located, and it is no longer a blank page. The great thing about the book module layout is it really gives you an overview of the flow of your book, and this is something that really needs to be considered. That's why I don't recommend using any of this auto layout material. If we pick auto layout, it'll place all the photos, but they're just going to be the sequence that I have on my filmstrip. The point is, random placement of photos is not really going to give you a satisfying book experience, and as you can see my particular images there in stacks so they have a white border and I would have to do a little bit of repositioning, not to mention that there is a limit. Teoh How maney photos You can put in a book before people lose interest, and my recommendation is something in the neighborhood of 50 Images usually makes for a good book. But another thing that makes her a good book is to have them all. Different sizes don't have them the same consistent size, every single page. Even if it is just a portfolio book and you're trying to show off your work, it is not visually exciting to maintain the same layout page after page after page. If you want to have page numbers show on your book, it's also under a page that there is your page number. Notice how the way this is currently laid out this page number actually interferes with the photo as it is. So I'm going to change the layout of what we have here. I'm going to switch this photo to be up to the sign. Having things that are off center or that touched the edge of the page is acceptable book design. It actually creates visual interest to go from this. Do this And if we want to scale this, we can you just click on the box? You really won't have an idea what actually looks good until you start positioning the pages in the spread view because this is how your actual viewer would see the book. And you won't get a sense if your book blows unless you look at the UAE view. And as you can see, the pages that were done with auto layout really are cluttered and unplanned and don't have a lot of thought behind them. The pages that I put a little bit of design in look so much more appealing and like something you would actually want to look at and read if I had filled this with a text block, which I am not going to do for you, but know that you can do it if you need to pick up and swap pages around. So I'm looking at 44 45 I feel like the material that's here and the material that's here would be better served if they were swapped. You can easily do that. It has to be in this view. Click the page, reposition it. You can also reposition the order of your photos on film strip. You are going to have to save your book. I will show you how I'll try to reposition it. And I get custom. Order is only supported in a safe book. Okay, create save book. We'll call it in Stacks Demo Project, Click Create and you'll note in my collection I actually have my saved book here. 5. Book Module Pt 3: on my pages. I have what are called guides, and these are lines that will not show up in the actual printed area of the book. What they're here for is to show you page bleed, text, safe area and photo cells so photo cells are where the picture goes. Take away the guide. It's not a great area anymore. It shows up when I mouse over it. But if I really want to see where the photos are supposed to go in this layout area, and I'm going to control Z back to where the photo was still in existence, Page Bleed is the area around the page where it's likely to be cut when it's processed as a book. So this photo is safe because it is going into what's called the gutter. It goes into that page, and that's one of the reasons why I moved this image this page over to the right hand side instead of the left hand side. When it was on the left hand side, that photo would have been trimmed in the page bleed. You can see here now if this was a regular photo and didn't have this instant film border around it. I probably would have found that acceptable to be trimmed just slightly there. But because my image has a little border around it to lose, just this portion would give me a little white border here and a thick white border here. And it really would have cut down on the attractiveness of the photo going to switch it back and show you another reason why I moved this one over here and kept these over here. Her body position is slightly off center in this image, and that gives the photo weight when put in this direction. These pictures are slightly off centre, but to the left. And I felt like this one specifically. And this one, we're both better served weighing this page in that direction. Now, sell padding is only going to show up when you have more than one thing in your image. So there is a photo and there's the text area. I'm going to go ahead and type some text so we can see what it looks like just to fill up this space. Okay, When I add cell padding, these elements are going to be brought further from each other and it definitely is a way to be a little more creative with your text placement. I'm not a big fan of what it did to this photo, though, so I'm gonna take patting down zero. The important thing to know is you're not stuck with the page labs as they are under type is where we make our own choices. You have all the fonts that you have downloaded on your computer. So if you want something that isn't generic, I recommend looking into either purchasing a phone to are looking into many of the thousands of free fonts that are available on the Internet. One thing I want to stress, though, is ledge ability is the most important part of design. If you utilize a fancy thought that nobody can read than your text is worthless, if that means going with a clear generic font like myriad pro, which is the one that my light room is defaulting to, or picking something that's in a very floral cursive I would default to using myriad pro Ariel. I would also recommend not having a huge block of text but breaking it up. So even though I'm typing a bunch of gobbledygook. It's only gonna be a few lines before I move on Teoh Another space. And presumably, if you're using light room to assemble a book using the book module, you are wanting to focus on the imagery rather than the writing, putting, maybe a caption or a poem. The making of the photo. Those kind of things are generally what you would associate with the photo book rather than having these gigantic blocks of text that really take away from the power of the image. Now, if you wanted to have a background on every single photo that is an option, it could be another photograph. So, Aiken, take this one, plop it here and we can alter the capacity. But as you can see, if I have it as a background for this, the text is now eligible. So if you are going to apply a background graphic, I want you to consider how it interferes with everything else you have on the page. Even when I take the capacity down to 50% it somewhat interferes because of this white spot in this black spot. My text, if it had any meaning to it, would be fairly illegible, pliant background globally means it's going to be on every single page I'm checking. That means it's only going to apply. See the pages you have selected. So if we back out of here and check in on some other photos, that background does not appear. 6. Book Module Pt 4: now, when we've taken the time and we have completed our book, we have two options. Son book to blurb or export book to pdf. I recommend exporting to pdf and looking at on a tablet or computer screen and seeing if everything flows the way that you want it. Teoh. It is a expensive mistake to send an entire book to blurb as this book stands with as many pages as it has, which is roughly 158. This would be a $73 book, and blurbed forces you to create a demo version of physical demo copy and mail it to yourself before you're even able to sell your book, I would export to pdf. I would look at it on multiple devices. I would show it to people who can be honest with you and tell you if things look repetitious or it's too much of the same. Or if the design is difficult because you can always come back, you can fix things on. Then when you're ready, you have a product that you want to sell or that you're proud of and you want to give away . That is when I choose send book to blurb. If you want to create multiple versions of the book in the collections menu, right click your book icon and it has an option that says Duplicate Book. So this is where we could make a new adoration, much like we make virtual copies in the other modules if we want to create a sort of new mix, a remixed version of something we've already created. 7. Slideshow Pt 1: slideshow module is something that you would use when you want to create a digital presentation or a PdF. And the pdf really isn't that terribly different from the book module, except that you are going to be working with, ah, horizontal background the way a computer screen normally is set up. The options in the slideshow module are pretty simple. We have borders just like our book module. We can cast a shadow, which you can see here. There is a little bit of a shadow on the edge of my frame. If you don't want that, you can take it off. It's really up to you. We have guides that allow we have guides that help us in positioning our photograph. And if we want to move only one you unclean link all, and you can shift things off to the side. We can alter the aspect ratio of our final slide show, so it's currently set to match my existing screen. But we also have a widescreen aspect ratio and four by three, which is an old television screen or an old monitor screen. The overlay of my name is what's called the identity plate, and we haven't talked about the identity plate yet, but that is actually something that is up here. This is where you can have your logo instead of your name. You can have different fonts, so we're going to edit our identity plate, and the way that you can do that is double click here. It has options using styled texted anyplace use graphical identity plate. And once again we're in our font menus. The graphical identity plate could be a PNG file. Have my logo as a PNG file. Not too bad, but there it is, up in the corner. I do think it's important to have an identity plate that is unique and isn't can't or just some font off of the computer. This is a representation of a body of work whenever you make a slight show, and that goes for even if it's wedding photos and it's going to be a slide show at the reception. Now text overlays. If we want to put captions on our image, go slideshow, add text overlay. You can also add text in this window. You have it here currently, it's alleged. Well, because it's in grey and it's against white. So we need to make some alterations. We click the white changes to black whenever you have text that's black, and it's still going to interfere with something that's against your backdrop. Or if you have Texas white, it's going to interfere with something that's against a backdrop. I would add a drop shadow, which is right below text overlays shadow. So let's talk about the backdrop. You have color wash and you have background color. The color wash creates a Grady INT that will transition from whatever your background color actually is. So if we turn a pass ity up and we change the angle, you'll see how there is a transition from purple two grey. If you want to go directly to a single color, I would unchecked color wash. I would go here and then pick whatever is suitable for your work. Most of the time, that's going to be all black or all white and in the context of this text that might move it over the work so it's legible. I might shrink the size of this photo so I have space for the text below it. That can be done by repositioning with the guides and changing the text to be white 8. Slideshow Pt 2: Creating a PdF or video slideshow is a lot simpler than creating a book format because you already know that people are going to be just viewing one screen at a time. However, you should put it in a lot of serious thought about the sequence of your images. What kind of story you want to tell. One advantage you have with the slideshow versus the book is you can add audio so it says music here and you would be able to pick music off of your hard drive. But it could also be something like interview footage. If I was doing a documentary piece, I might have audio interviews with whoever my subject was that played alongside this portion of the slide. If I was doing some nature shots, I might have actual audio from the natural environment. The music you pick can allow you to sing to this life, so this track is three minutes and 48 seconds long. If I click sink slides to music, it's going toe automatically. Pick how long each slide should be represented to fill out that entire musical track. The default slide length is four seconds, with the cross fade of 2.5. When I click fit to music with a song that is three minutes and 48 seconds long, it's going to be 16.7 seconds for every single slide here. And there's only 11 so you can imagine looking at 11 photos for nearly four minutes. It's a bit too long Pan and Zoom is where the photos actually move and scale so they'll get larger as the slide show goes on. And this is a similar effect to the Qin Burns effect. It's something that adds movement to things that normally would be static, so I'll go ahead and do a preview of this effect. And as you can see where pans and zooms doesn't really feel appropriate for this material, it's going to make this portrait larger for 14 seconds. In the meantime, important details air being left out of the image when you've previewed it and found something you're happy with. Go ahead and export it either as Pdf or his video, so your video choices are well H D, and then a bunch of smaller ones that you probably be unlikely to use. Exporting the pdf You have some quality and pixel size settings. The last step is creating your save slideshow. And like our book module and what we will see in the print module, it is saved within the collection that you originated from. 9. Print Module: we're going to head over to the print module. But before we do that in the library module, I'm going to create a collection print. Maggie. As with the other non library modules, you only have access to your collections. So when you want to do things like this, it's good to set up a collection before you head over there. This particular print is currently set up as to rose two columns, and the cell sizes are defined by how a normal piece of paper would be divided up. We have many, many options in the print module, but a lot of them are very common sense. So in this particular instance, layouts, stylus, single image or contact sheet, a contact sheet is referenced to darker photography, where you might have 36 exposures on a 35 millimeter roll of film, and you looked at all of those pictures on one single sheet. It was a contact print of the negatives onto a single piece of paper, and you used a small magnifying loop to take a look at those pictures and see which were the good ones worthy of your time to go print. This would be a single image on this print. If the rose were down to one and the columns were down to one, you can manipulate the cell size all the way to be a full sheet of paper. And here it tells you how maney prints this would be. If I were to quit the print button, it would be Page one of four. Each image gets a full sheet of paper. It's more common toe have an edge than to do a full bleed. So if you needed to have a white border to it, stroke border, check it. Create your border. Select the color and stroke border will work even if you end up having to rose. Two columns, four pictures on one sheet Of the other options. Repeating one photo per page means Page one will be entirely this image a picture packages similar to when a child, because their school pictures taken and then you have options of various sizes. So I pick this image Goto picture package scroll below, and then I have standard sizes. So if I pick a five by seven and a two by 25 it automatically sizes those images and places them on the paper, as is now when my daughter comes home and she has her picture package choices from the photography company, there is always a watermark, so I can't just scan those and not have to buy from the company. If this is something that you're concerned about, you can have your identity plate over every photo across the entire page You can place watermarks. These watermarks are the same ones that I had set up in the export menu in the library module. And if you refer back to the library module lessons under exporting, we show you how to add watermarks. The last layout style of the print menu is the custom package, and the custom package really is a free hand placement of images. It's similar to the concept of digital scrapbooking, where it's okay for pictures to overlap and to be kind of random in their placement. Whenever you have a print that you like, I encourage you to create a saved print, and the reason for this is because then you do not have to reassemble any sort of layout that you have here create save Prince. Call it Maggie, black and white and it is actually going to be located within the collection that this is based on. So if you look over my collection section, I have print Maggie as a collection than I have a little icon of a printer, says Maggie. Black and White. It contains three photos in the bottom of our right panel. We have a print job interface, and it has resolution setting the sharpening I would usually go for lower standard. When you go for high, it really shows in your print and maybe not in a way that looks attractive. Draft mode printing is your test. I would encourage you to print drafts before you spend the ink on a high quality print. Many of these options are exactly the same when you actually open up a print interface. You either check your print settings here or your printer, and they're going to vary printer by printer. Also, they're gonna very Mac and Windows, so hopefully you know how to operate some of those things on your own. But a lot of those print settings will be specific. Teoh the kind of prints set up you have at home. I usually use a service to do my printing. So what I might do is create my save print here and in print settings. Because I'm using a Mac, I can actually save it as a PdF and then send that PDF to the printing company. 10. Web Module: I'm going to talk very briefly about the Web module and the reason why I'm going to be so briefed about the Web modules because it has changed very little since Light Room was introduced, circa 6 4007 I don't know anybody who really would use thes kinds of Web galleries anymore . And the reason why I say that is because we have so many great free options on the Internet right now. It could be instagram. It could be 500 PX. It could be flicker. It could be Facebook galleries, but every single Social media gallery is preferable to doing anything with the light room Web gallery. And truthfully, if you're using an old style presentation method for your images, it is not gonna reflect very well on you as a photographer. So if you were to create a gallery such as this and send it to a curator, they would probably not take you very seriously. And the same goes for magazines or anybody else that you want to have. Appreciate your work. I 100% recommend use any of the existing social media sites or create a PdF or create a book if you want your work to be put in the hands of somebody whose opinion matters, and that is by far the better way to present your work than using light rooms. Web module. 11. Catalogs: Now there are things that we haven't discussed in light room that you don't access through the modules you access through the menu's One involves catalogs, and we pretty much have been working entirely in one catalog this entire time. Actually have a few catalogs, and the catalogues all have different images in them. They might have different metadata settings. Only one catalogue sinks with light room mobile on and in the case of light room, how to. So this catalogue only has 764 photos in it. If I was to travel over to my May 2016 catalogue, this has something in the neighborhood of 131,188 photos and it. Each catalogue takes up a certain amount of space in your hard drive, and I believe that this one, it's roughly 25 gigs. For all the adjustments, metadata, alterations, everything I have when I back it up is 25 gigs in size. So it's good to have more than one in catalogue, especially if you're doing client work and you want to create things that are specific only to particular genres of photography. So I might have a catalog that Onley features my family photography and doesn't have any of my artsy fashion stuff in it. The way to create a new catalogue is file new catalogue, Name it, save it. And when you close out of light room, it will ask you if you want to back up. Your catalog workshop is a catalogue I have that's entirely full of students work. So when I teach live, they load their photos into this catalog, and then it doesn't mix up with my own personal work and made some alterations to this head photo click out of it. It asked me if I want to back it up. I have options. It's a good idea to frequently back up your catalog, maybe once a month, because I have had it happened where my catalogue became corrupted and when it became corrupted. All of a sudden I had no access to all of the alterations I made within light room. If you lose those, it could be months worth of work. If you haven't been backing up your catalog, just know that each backup is a very large file on your hard drive, so if you have some good backups, you can get rid of the previous existing ones 12. Wrap Up + Project: guys. Once again. Thanks for taking this class. I have my other light room tutorials upon my skill share channels. So feel free to check those out. I want to see your projects. I want to see your pdf presentations. So please link those on the skill share product page. Tell me about the process. Do you think this is something that you're going to use a lot in the future? Do you have any ideas for your PDFs that you can't currently accomplish what you want to start working towards? I hope you got a lot out of this. And I know that light room has opened my own photographic creativity enormously. Before I was using light room and I was only using photo shop. It was one photo at a time. It was a big struggle because photo shop is a design mess. But light room is really streamlined the process. Things have gotten a lot faster, and I really enjoy making books. And pdf's because that is a great way to control the presentation of your work. Thanks again and talk to you next time.