Transcripts
1. Create a Triptych in Lightroom or Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Mastering Printing, Create a Triptych in Adobe Lightroom and in Adobe Camera Raw. In addition to teaching Illustrator and Photoshop, the Graphic Design for Lunch series of classes also includes some photo editing and photo management classes. These are taught for both Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw as both applications share the same base code. This means that within one class, you'll simply focus on whichever application you prefer to use. Today, we're going to look at creating a triptych. Now, traditionally in art terms, these were three panel images that sort up. Well, as this isn't going to fall, but it is going to be a panel of three images all printed on the one page. We're going to look at how you would do this using the print module in Lightroom. We're going to do that first and then I'm going to go to Photoshop. I'm going to show you how you could achieve the same effect in Photoshop using images that you're importing into Photoshop, for example, via Adobe Camera Raw, if you're working with raw images or indeed any image that you can open in Photoshop. Now, as you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs-up, and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, grab three images and let's get started on creating a triptych. I'm going to do first in Lightroom, and then the later videos are going to relate to Photoshop.
2. Pt 1 - Lightroom Triptych: I'm here in Lightroom and I've created a collection of images called triptych. I just called it triptych and I dropped the images into it that I wanted to use. I went to the folder of images that I was looking at, which was some images that I shot in Rome. I had a look through for the images that I wanted to include in that collection and then I dragged and dropped them into the collection. Well, that's one of the ways that you can do it and that's going to work really well for you. Just go and find an image, for example, I'll just target this one, go down to my collection and I'm just going to drag and drop it into my collection. Now my collection has one more image that I could use in my triptych. You want to build up a small collection of images because I had like thousands of photos in that folder. I don't want to be confused by having thousands of photos to look at. I just want to be able to have a few. I'm actually not going to use this one, so I'm just going to right-click and remove it from the collection. Of course, removing it from a collection doesn't remove it from the folders and it certainly doesn't remove it from Lightroom. It's just not in the collection any longer. With this collection, what I was looking at was that ultimately, I'm going to use a landscape sheet of paper for this print job or for the triptych. The images I want to use in there are going to have to be portrait orientation. I'm going to have to be able to get an interesting portrait orientation element out of them because of the way the paper is arranged. In contrast, if you're going to use a portrait sheet of paper, so that's going to be taller than it is wide, then the images you're going to want to use are going to be landscape images because you have to fit three of them across the sheet of paper. It's like if you're going to do landscape, look for portrait images or images that could be cropped to portrait. If you're going to use a portrait sheet of paper, then use landscape images. Now I've got my group of images, just six images that I think are going to work pretty well for this triptych that I selected into a collection, so I'm not confused by having too many images to look at. I'm going now from the library module into the print module. Once you get to the print module, what you see here is going to depend on what you last did in the print module. You're going to see something probably completely different to this. This module is really confusing, so we're just going to take it step-by-step so that you get everything set up exactly the way you want it to be. I'm going to hit here to print job first of all. Let's look first at what you're going to do if you want to print this to a printer that's attached to your computer. You're going to select print to printer. There's a drop-down list here you want to choose printer. Then you're going to come back here to the buttons here. There'll be two on a Mac, there's just one on a PC. You're going to set up not only your printer, but also you'll paper. I've selected a Photosmart printer. I've set my paper size to letter, and I'm going to use landscape orientation. Click Okay. You'll do the same on the Mac. Select your printer and select your paper. On the screen, you should see your letter size sheet of paper or whatever size you're using, and it should be in landscape orientation because that's what we're going to do here now. Now if you don't want to print to a printer, you don't have a printer to print to, but you want to create a document that you could then send out to a commercial printing service, this is what you're going to do. You're going to come up to this print job panel and you're going to set this to JPEG file. Now we're going to set up here all the things that we need to create a JPEG print. We're going to set the file resolution to 300 pixels per inch. I want to create a 17 by 13 document, so I'm going to type 17 and 13 because this gives me a slightly larger size page. I've set my JPEG quality to a 100 percent. I'm creating a large size document for printing. So far so good. Next, we're going to go to the layout style and we're going to choose custom package. Because what custom package does is it allows us to create our own look for our document. Now whatever you see here's going to, again, depend on what you've been doing in Lightroom for some period of time before now. Just know that whatever you see on your screen is going to be different to what I'm seeing on my screen. But basically, what I want to do is go and remove all those cells until I just get one. One cell is fine, but you certainly don't want any more. Now if you've got identity plates or watermarks set, go to the page panel here, you want to turn off any identity plate and turn off any watermarking. They're the sorts of things that you're likely to have still in place. I'm going to go to this cell and it looks like it's locked. Let's go to the cell's panel here. I have locked to photo aspect ratio selected. Well, I don't want it selected, because I want to make this cell the size I want it to be. I'm looking at putting three of these across the page, so I think that's probably going to be about the size it needs to be. Well, I'm writing it off here as 4.5 inches wide, so if I multiply that out, I'll be able to fit them across a 17-inch sheet of paper. It's 8.87. Well, I'm going to make that nine for a nice round number. I'm thinking that 4.25 might be better. Just a little bit smaller, give these images a little bit more of breathing space. Now that I've got my cell size correct, I'm going to Alt or Option Drag to more across. Now Lightroom doesn't give you a lot of arrangement options here. There's no distributed evenly across the page or anything here. You can turn on your ruler units and you can set your grid snap to grid, which we're going to do. Grid. Showing grids is not really going to help at all because there's really nothing here that's going to allow you to space things evenly except your own eye. You're just going to eyeball this. I think I'm going to come in a little bit from either side. Once you've got things neatly arranged on the screen, you're good to go. The next thing we're going to do is start putting our photos in. I'm going to grab this one and just drag and drop it into here. As you can see, disaster struck yet again. Let's go here, put this one in here, more disaster. This one here, put in here, that one went in okay. What's happening is that there's a legacy setting here that has a rotate to fit so that my landscape images are rotating into these landscapes shaped boxes. I don't want them to do that. I want my pictures to be up the right way, so I'm going to image settings, I'm going to disable rotate to fit. All of these are the kinds of settings that you may or may not have set. You might drag and drop your images in and they'll be perfect the first time, but you may also may drag and drop them in. It might be disaster like you've just seen for me. I just want to show you the settings that you will need to be familiar with to create this triptych effect with whatever size images or shape images you put into these boxes. Now in here, this image is wider than the box, so I can Control or Command drag on the image inside the box to move it. You can see that there's some flexibility, some movement, for this image. There'll be some movement for this image as well. You can arrange the portion of the image, particularly for these landscape images that you want to see in the cell. I'm thinking, here's the more interesting piece here, so I'm going to put him in. Just going to arrange things until you get them to look the way that you want them to look. Now there's no opportunity to move up and down here because the full height of the image will be used. The only movement is going to be horizontal movement. Now that I've done that, I can look at something like an identity plate. Now I have some identity plates. I actually got one that's called Adobe Camera and Lightroom for lunch. It's just a text identity plate. It's a very pale gray. Just going to click override color, I'm going to select a slightly darker gray, but not black. Now with identity plates, you can turn it on, click the fly out menu here, click edit. You can go and create your own text identity plate. Just type some text in here. Again, it's pretty plain. There's just a choice of font and of font size. Nothing spectacular, but you can create a nice little text identity plate. You can also use graphical identity plates, but that's beyond the scope of today's class. Now that I've got that all done, I'm just going to double-check my print job options. 300 PPI, 17 by 13 inches. Everything's looking good. At this stage, you would print to your printer if you have your printer attached and you've got that all set up. If you were planning to print to file, we'll just click to print to file. Now I've got a folder here for my image, so I'm just going to type test. Once Lightroom has finished the print job, we can go and have a look at it in the folder. Here's the folder here, and here is the test image. It's 5,100 by 3,900 pixels in size because it's a 17 by 13 image at 300 PPI. It's about six megabytes of image. That's all ready for me to now send to a commercial printing service. That's how you create a triptych in Lightroom. You just really need to have your wits about you because the print module here is difficult to work with, particularly when you're a new user. Just want to systematically go through, but make sure you set up your paper first, whether it be your print paper or the paper size that you want to use for your JPEG file. Just set up all your dimensions and then start working on the document. Now that I've done this, I can create a saved print format. I'm just going to click here on create save print. I'm going to call this triptych portrait images. Now I don't want to include only the used photos, so I'm just going to de-select that so that all of these images would be available to me. It's going to be inside the triptych collection, so I'll just click Create. What happens now is that I have a collection here. Here's my triptych collection, and here is my triptych portrait images layout. Anytime I want to get to this arrangement of images and this collection of images, I can just come in here, click on this triptych portrait images option. Now that's just saving the layout for the collection, but what if I wanted to have this template available to use anytime for any set of images. Well, I will go and create this as a template. I'm going to the template browser, I'm going to click the plus icon here, and I'm going to create a new template. I'm going to call this triptych landscape portrait images. Now the folder that I want for it is just my user templates, so I'm just going to put it in the collection of templates that I have been building up in Lightroom. I'm just going to click create. Now this is a template inside the template browser collection. If I just scroll down here to my user templates, here is my triptych landscape that I've just saved. This is going to be available for any folder or any collection of images inside Lightroom at anytime in the future. Let's see how we would go and use that. I'm going back to the library module, and I'm going to select a different collection of images. These are some images that I use for my Skillshare classes. I've just selected that particular collection. I'm going back to the print module. We've got a completely different collection here in place. I'm going to my template and I'm just going to make sure that I have selected my triptych template. You can see that we're switching templates here, and we're going to the one that we just created and it's here. Now I can use it by just dragging and dropping images into the template. It's going to work exactly the same way as the template worked for the collection of images that we were using earlier. All of these are adjustable and the entire template itself is adjustable because it's just a Lightroom template, so we know that we can come in here and, for example, take out the identity plate or replace it with something else. But having spent the time creating this template, it now makes it accessible to us at anytime in the future. Hand in hand with the template, is the specification for it. The fall resolution and the file dimensions all come with that template they're built in to it. That's how to create a triptych in Lightroom. As a bonus, we've saved it as a template so that we can reuse it over and over again without having to recreate it every time we need it.
3. Pt 2 - Photoshop Triptych: Now, to create a triptych in Photoshop, we're going to create a new file, so I'm going to choose "File", "New". I'm just making mine 11 by 8.5 inches which is US letter size and I'm using landscape orientation. You want to make your document the size that you want to print out. I'm going to click "Create". I made a few guides just to make it a little bit easier in Photoshop. I'm going to choose "File", "New Guide". Now, because this is working in pixels right now, I have to be really clear about my units of measurements. I'm going to put one at half an inch in here from the verticals, then click "OK", then put one over here at 10.5 inches. This is going to give me a half inch border around everything. I'm typing 10.5 and then I-N for inches. Then what went in from the top again, another half inch. It's going to be a horizontal guide, 0.5, type I-N for inches, click "OK". I'm going to make sure that I am working on a brand new layer. Now, I'm going to draw the boxes that are going to contain the image. I'm going to the Rectangular Marquee Tool and I'm going to make sure that my snaps are turned on which they're not. This will snap to guide. That's good. I'm just ready to start drawing my first rectangle. I'm looking at creating something that is a bit less than one-third of the inside space here because I want some gap between my actual boxes. It's going to be about 800 pixels wide. I think that's going to be pretty good. I have black as my foreground color, I'll press Alt, Backspace, Option, Delete to fill that with black. Now I'm going to make two copies of this. I'm going to take one of these and move it across and snap it into position here. I'm going to take the middle one and move it across into position here. Now, I'm thinking it's just a little bit too small so I'm going to go and trash those and go back to the one that I do have. I got a selection over here I'm just going to deselect my selection by pressing Control or Command-D. Just widening this a little bit, I'm going to go and do that all over again. Two more copies, and I'm going to drag them into position and just double-check them. Everything is looking really good. The smart guide told me they were spaced out nicely. Now, if I'm not sure, I'm going to select all three layers, click on the top one, shift-click on the bottom one, I'm going to click here on "Distribute Horizontal Centers" to make sure that these are nice and evenly spaced. I've got my guides and I've got my boxes, now I need my pictures. I'm going to choose "File" and then "Place Embedded". I'm going to go and get the first of my images. I'm selecting it, clicking "Place". Now, this is a DNG image so it's going to open in Adobe Camera Raw on its way to Photoshop. I've got a resize option set for this. I don't want to resize it, I want to bring it in at full size. I can make edits to the image on the way through and then just click "OK". This image is coming in as a smart object. I'm just going to place it roughly where I want it to be. I'm looking at this house and this canal as being what I want to show in my triptych, so I'm just roughly placing it in position. I'm going to the image here now and I'm going to go and get the layer I want to work with which is this one that has the box over here. I'm going to click on my image layer and choose "Layer", "Create Clipping Mask". That clips the image to the box on the layer below. Now, when I go to my image layer and I have the Move Tool selected, I can just move the image into position. I can also size it. There's a little bit of vertical sizing available here without making it too small to fit in the box. There is the first of my images in position. Now, I'm going to this layer here, I'm going to put something in the middle here so I'm just selecting the layer and choose "File", "Place Embedded". I'm going to my second image. Again, it's a DNG image so it's opening in Adobe Camera Raw on it's way through to Photoshop. It's very tall, and so I don't want it to be really tall. I'm going to place it roughly in position. It's immediately over the box that is going to control its size. With that layer selected, "Layer", "Create Clipping Mask". This means that I can now move the image into position. Finally, I have one here so again, "File", "Place Embedded", go and get my third image that I've already isolated and selected to use. I'll click "OK". Again, resize my boat man down. He is on top of the layer, he's going to be clipped, it needs to be in that order. I can choose "Layer", "Create Clipping Mask", or I can hold the Alt and Control command option on the Mac with his layer selected and just click once, and that clips it. It's the same as choosing "Layer", "Create Clipping Mask". Now that that's done, I can also position him. I'll just click on his image here, and I can position him in position. Now, my last palette is a little bit untidy. I'm a little bit concerned about this. What I would like to do is to bring this image here to the bottom. I'm going to grab its clipping mask and the image. I'm going to drag them to the very bottom, just above the background. This gives me this image here, and then the middle image, and then the top image. It's just a little bit more logical in terms of how the document is arranged. I don't need my guides anymore so I'm going to choose "View", "Clear Guides". Now, anytime I can replace one of these images. For example, let's go and select him. I have him selected and because he's come in as a smart object so that Place Embedded option embeds him as a smart object, I can right-click this layer and choose replace contents. I've got another image here that I'm just selecting, I'm going to click "Place." Now, this is also a DNG image so it's opening in Adobe Camera Raw on it's way through to Photoshop so I could make all my adjustments here if I wanted to, then click "OK". He is now replaced with this building and I can scale the building up, and then just position it where I want it to appear inside the final triptych and click the check mark. By creating this document in Photoshop, we've actually set it up as a template. All we need to do in future is to go to one of these images, right-click and choose "Replace Contents", and we can replace the contents with any image, it can be a DNG or a raw image file, it can also be a JPEG file. It's just going to come in here as a smart object. This is a template. We could add a little bit of text to this if we wanted to, and you can just save this as a template file. Now, Photoshop doesn't have template but what you can do is manage it yourself. You call this triptych template and you might write yourself some notes somewhere to just say that when I am going to use this, all I need to do is to select each of these image layers and just very simply right-click and choose replace contents and I can drop any image into this template that I've created. That's how to create a triptych in Photoshop and of course, you could create a portrait orientation one in exactly the same way. If you have a portrait orientation one, then your images are going to be landscaped. You want to pick some images that are going to look great trimmed to landscape orientation for that kind of triptych.
4. Project and Wrapup: Your project for this class is going to be to create a triptych, either a triptych in Lightroom or one in Photoshop depending on which application you're here to learn. When you've created your triptych, post a picture of it to the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned some features of Lightroom and Photoshop that perhaps you are unfamiliar with in creating your triptych. As you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write in just a few words why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
