Lightroom 4 - Print the Perfect Image

[Getting Started with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4] Hi, and welcome, my name is Julieanne Kost, and we're going to take the next few minutes to look at the print module and see all of the different custom layouts and templates you can make. Let's begin by taking this collection over to the print module. Simply click on print there in the module picker, but you can also use command or control P in order to navigate directly to the print module. Now the first thing you want to do in the print module is you want to set up your page setup and your print settings. Now on the Mac there's 2 buttons, on Windows there's only 1 button, but you have access to all of the same settings. We'll begin with page setup because I need to tell Lightroom what printer I'm using and how to format it. Let's go ahead and select our printer here, and choose our paper size. I'm going to go ahead and move up to maybe the 11 x 17 inch paper. I'll keep the orientation the same and then click okay. Now, I need to go into the print settings second, but, again, if you're on Windows this is all in that 1 dialogue. You'll need to select your printer, and then you'll need to come down here and go to your print settings. Now, I'm going to show you how to set up this specific printer that I have. Your printer options here might vary a little bit, but I need to print a manual feed because I'm going to switch this to the fine art paper, which is what I typically print to, the velvet fine art paper, and I really should keep that in mind because I'm going to need to pick a profile when I'm in the print-job panel later on. These have to match or your results will probably give you something less than what you are expecting. I'll set my media type, the color--I definitely want it in color as opposed to 1 of the other options, and I'm going to turn the color settings off because I want Lightroom to control the color management, meaning that I want Lightroom to take my images, and using the profile that I assign in the print job, I want Lightroom to convert the images from the space they're in, in Lightroom, the color space into the printer space, and I don't want to double color management, which is what would happen if I set up my profile in the print job and set it up here. I'm going to turn it off. Then, you can choose from all the other different options that you have. I might turn off high speed for example, and now you'll notice in the lower right it actually says save. So, I am going to be saving these settings, and later when I save my template these settings will be saved with it. Excellent, now let's move to the right-hand side, and you'll notice that we have 3 different layout styles. You can either do a single image or a contact sheet that's the first layout style. You can do a picture package or we can go into the custom package layout. First we'll take a look at just the single image. You'll also notice right below in the image settings that I can choose to zoom to fill. I could rotate my image to fit, and I could choose to repeat 1 photo per page. Now that doesn't make sense at the moment because we're only looking at 1 image in 1 cell, but if we look in the layout area and I were to increase the page grid for example, now you can see how we're repeating the 1 image per page. If I turn that off now you can see because I have multiple images selected in my film strip that Lightroom is going to automatically place 1 image per cell. Before I close the image settings area, you should also know that if you wanted to add a stroke around each one of your images, you can do so and you can change the color here, and in fact if I add a little bit of cell spacing we can kind of see that a little bit more clearly. All right, for now I'm going to go ahead and turn all of these options off in image settings and let's close that panel for a moment. In fact, I'm going to right-mouse click and set this to solo mode so that I'm only looking at 1 panel at a time. All right, in the layout panel, since I really only want 1 image at this point in time, I'm going to decrease the rose in columns, and it would be really helpful if I could actually see the guides that define this area. Let's go to our guides panel and we'll show the guides. Now we'll go back to layout and hopefully all these things like margins and cell sizes will make a little bit more sense. We can see that this outer area here--these are the margins. I'm going to turn those off or at least decrease them by moving all of the margins to the far left. Now you can see the 4 lines that are left here. Those are the cell size, and I can increase that cell size if I want to, and it would make more sense right now, I think, just because of the orientation of this paper. If I wanted to print this image larger I should return back to the image settings and tell it to rotate to fit. Of course if I was trying to print this image with a lot of white space around it, then I might want to turn that off, but for now let's leave it on. All right, let's return back to layout because I think we kind of mastered just the 1 image per page, but let's see what happens if we want to add multiple rows or multiple columns. Here I would just enter in the numbers or simply move over the sliders. This is a great way, for example, if you wanted to print a contact sheet. Some people like the images to rotate. You can see that the horizontal ones and the vertical ones are rotating depending on their orientation. If you didn't like that you could click on this keep square option in which case all the horizontals would remain horizontals and the verticals would remain verticals. It might just be a little bit easier to see the images this way. All right, let's click off our guides for a minute so that we can see that. See how these--there's no cell spacing in between them so I might go back to layout and just simply add a wee bit of cell spacing so that we can really see the difference from 1 image to the next. Okay, so that's how you would layout a contact sheet. Of course, you can add additional things underneath each 1 of your images if you go down to the page area. For example, you might want to show some photo info underneath each image. For example, you might want to see the name of the image or something else that Lightroom can gather from the metadata of that file if we want to show all the information we can. We can change the font size if you want to. That's kind of a lot of information to show per image, but I think you get the idea. We also have the option for page options here. We can show page numbers and page info which is quite helpful. This tells you what the sharpening was set to, what your profile is set to, and also what printer you used when you printed this, and we can show crop marks if you know that you're going to cut the images and crop them yourself. We can turn that off for now, and let's go back up to our layout and just not have quite as many rows or columns so we can see a few more of our images a little bit larger. Maybe a 2 x 3 grid there. Excellent, let's go back to layout style for a moment and switch over to picture package. Picture package is a little different in that it will always give you multiple copies of the same image on the page, but you can come down to the cell area and you can add additional cells. We can click on any of these buttons in order to add more images, or we can use the drop-down menu and select a different size, or we can create edit and then enter in our own custom size, and you notice that the last time I clicked that because there wasn't enough space on this piece of paper Lightroom automatically added a secondary piece of paper, and it would continue to do that, and if it's too much then obviously you could just click on the little X, and it would get rid of that, but that's how you would set up your picture package, and of course you can move these around to redistribute them if you think that you can distribute them better than maybe Lightroom did in the automated way that you added them so that you can add additional copies of the same image on a single sheet of paper. This should really help not waste any paper. All right, the last layout style is the custom package, and it also allows you to add different size cells, but the great thing here is that you can add cells that for one thing they overlap and then all you have to do in order to add an image is select the image from the film strip and drag it into the cell. Here I can select a different image and drag into that cell, and you'll notice that I can reposition the cells. I can also make the cells larger or smaller. I could lock the photo aspect ratio to the cell. If I click on that then you'll notice that the cell changed size so that it would meet the aspect ratio of the image, but, again, I can make that larger or smaller. I might want to pull that down and bring this up, and if I wanted to I could send this to the back. Depending on which image I want to have overlapping the other image, we can just right-mouse click, send it back, send backwards or front. You can rotate the cell. You can delete the cell. All sorts of options here in the custom layout. Now, I'm not going to walk through every scenario here. I'm going to show you some custom templates in a minute, but first let's make sure that we got through all of the different options here on the right side including some additional options in the page panel. You can see that you can set your background color here, and I could click on this, and we could choose white for example if we were going to an ink jet printer because we might not want to waste all of that black ink. You can click anywhere in this color area. You can drag outside and sample a color from your photograph. You can use the little elevator bar right here to get more saturation and pick a color that way. It's up to you what color you want your background. For now we'll turn that off. You can add an identity plate no matter which one of these layout styles you're using. You can grab either some text and use just the text identity plate, or you can use a graphical identity plate like we did back in the slide show. All I would need to do is locate the file, and in this case I will navigate to my demo files, and we'll look at maybe an identity plate or a watermark would work just fine too, and I'll select this white watermark and then click choose. I'll go ahead and click okay, and then we can see that I have a watermark here that I can overlap anywhere on my images. I can also size that and make it larger. What would probably be a better example here is if I had used maybe the logo for my studio because we do also have the option to add a watermark, but, again, just like in the slide show module this watermark is going to overlay on top of each one of my images, and, again, I can use something that is a graphical watermark or we can go in here and just type something in. We could use our text option here, and then down here you might write something like proof, right? And we can select that and we can add maybe something that has a little bit thicker of a font, something like impact maybe, and then we can tell it where exactly we want that to appear on top of our image and what opacity we want to set that to. We might want to bring down the opacity but anchor it right in the center of our image, and maybe we need to make that a little bit larger. Again, it all depends on who it is that you are giving these images to or printing these images for as to which options you'll select as far as identity plates and watermarking. Finally, we'll go down to the print job area because there are 2 things that you can print to. Now, by default this is set to print to a printer because that's what the majority of photographers will be doing. The draft mode printing that's going to be a lower quality print so typically I would recommend that we leave that off. The print resolution you can leave that off as well. The only reason to turn that on would be if you have a specific image that maybe you have taken to Photoshop, and it is at a specific resolution, and you've sharpened that image for that exact resolution, and you don't want Lightroom or the printer driver to touch it at all you would turn this on, but otherwise turn that off and that way Lightroom can look at the image, and it will know the original size of the image. It will know what size you're trying to print it at and if needs to it will either interpolate up or interpolate down in order to match what you've told it to do. Okay as far as print sharpening goes basically you want to pick your media type, whether you're printing a glossy or matte paper. In this case I was going to print to that velvet fine art matte so I would choose matte, and then I would choose low standard or high, and really I guess the media type I always here people say, "Well that's the recipe, and then the standard low or high that's kind of your seasoning to taste there." I'm going to go with standard, but you know I did a book on clouds taken-- --they were aerial shots in which case I would probably set this to low, or if I was looking for that really crisp look and I was printing to maybe premium glossy paper then I might set this to high, but it's just going to take a little bit of experimenting and print testing on your part to know which images you should set to which amount. I've the option here because of the operating system that I'm using and the printer that I'm going to to print in 16 bit if I want to, and I had the option to set the color management not to be managed by the printer, but instead I'm going to pick my profile here and let Lightroom color manage my print work flow. You can see I have a few profiles here that I can choose from or I can go to other and that will list all of the profiles that I have installed, but of course I don't want to see all of these profiles all the time so I've just checked the ones that I use quite often, and of course you can create your own printer profiles as well. Add them to this list and then check those on if you want to use those as well. Okay, 1 last thing that I actually cover in the soft proofing movie is this print adjustment. We have put this in Lightroom 4 just because one of the most common complaints we get is that when people are looking at their images on screen they look great, and then when they print them, they're just printing a little dull or a little flat. If they're a little bit dull you can add a little bit of brightness on output. If they're a little bit flat you can add a little bit of contrast, but you're not going to see these effects; these effects are added on output just like the print sharpening is. Again, it might take a little bit of experimentation in order to get those to the place where you're happy with them. If you're completely color calibrated you may never use this print adjustment. You might just want to turn this off. When you're ready to print all you need to do is click print 1. I was a little confused about this. I was always going to the print...button, but what that does is it actually brings up all those print options that we already took the time at the very beginning to set. I don't need to set up all these options again; that's just confusing. I would hit cancel, and then I would hit print 1. What you should know though is if you're in one of these other layout styles, for example the single image contact sheet or maybe the picture package, if you have multiple images selected down here in the film strip and you tell Lightroom to use the selected photos or all of the film-strip photos, well, when you click print 1 Lightroom is going to go ahead and print 1 copy of each 1 of your pages. That's actually a huge feature right? In Photoshop, traditionally in the past you would have to open each file and print it. Now I can just set up my template, select all of my images at one time, and then click print 1, and it would print all of these multiple pages out. Now I didn't really show any brilliant templates there. So, what I just wanted to do was take a moment and show you maybe some of the other layouts that I've come up with or that I've used in the past. Here is just a layout--I do a lot of square format imaging, and so this is just a diptych. It's just 2 images side by side, and let's show our guides for now just so you can see what's going on. I have my 2 images here and then I have an identity plate right down here. Here's another example, all I've done here is remove the identity plate and I've added a black background.♪ I have print templates--gosh, I forgot to mention I have print templates not only to print but also to print to a jpeg file for things like my blog. In fact, that's what this one is right here because remember I told you in the print job most people print to printers, but you can see I've actually changed this to a jpeg file, and when you change the option to a jpeg file, now all of a sudden you get to enter in exactly the file dimensions that you want for output. What I typically do because when I'm working on the web I usually want a total pixel count, not a resolution. What I do is I just enter in the pixel counts, so this would be 1224 x 612. That's the size of the area that I want my photos to fit, and then I just put that as a resolution of 100, and so that will give me 1224 pixels by 6012 pixels when I output this. Okay, let's go here. Here's a template where there's 3 panoramas and all I need to do here is simply drag and drop these, right? And then if they don't come in at exactly the right place, I can hold down the command or the control key here, and then I can reposition them within the area that I've defined. All right, what else do we have? We have a 3 x 3 proof sheet here with the word proof over it on black. We've got a 5 up just vertical, and any time I check that fit to fill we can go in here and we can kind of change the placement of these images, and of course I can also change which images show up there, and I can change the order in which they show up by clicking and dragging down here in my collection if I want a different order for my images to appear. All right, right here I've just got--what is it--8 images up. Here I've got a little--oh, this I was printing for my calendar. This is multiple copies of the same image, and I was cutting them small. It was a terrible project that I finally bailed on. This is a card, so this is a custom template where I can, again, just drag and drop on 1 side so the fold would come right down the middle, and I'm using the identity plate so that after I fold it I'll have my logo on the back of it. We've got a full sheet template, so here the option here underneath the page area, this identity plate, what I have is my identity plate. This graphic is the same size as the image that I'm printing, and so I made this in Photoshop. It's just got this little stroke around here. It's got the text on it, and it's got this graphic here. This is 1 giant image that I made in Photoshop, and then I just set that as my identity plate, and told Lightroom to render my identity plate behind the images so that I could go ahead and just drag and drop the images in these squares, and that way you could include like custom branding for your studio while you're printing out of Lightroom, and then finally here's just 1 more example of kind of this drag and drop where you can just use this layout style that's really customizable in order to layout your images any way that you want, and of course this red back here that red is just the guides that are showing, so we can turn that off and that's what it would look like instead, and you can see there's a little stroke around those. When you do finalize on a project if you want to save this project, then what you need to do is you need to create a saved print. That's different from saving a template, right? A template you can use with another collection of images, any collection of images, right? You just--maybe you go to Italy and you grab that collection. You bring it into the print module and then you can use the same template for those images, but when you create a saved print you're like you're marrying this collection of images with this print layout. Let's go ahead and do that, and I will call this Ireland. Print, I want to save this inside my Ireland collection set. We'll click create, and now you can see down in my collections I have a new kind of collection which is a print collection which contains the 4 images because I told it to when I created the collection. It contains the 4 images that I have in this specific layout. That means tomorrow, or next week, or next month after I've been working with a bunch of different images if I wanted to print those images again, all I'd need to do is click on the right arrow next to that print collection and it would take me directly to the print module. I could click print and I would get the exact same result using those exact same images. Well, that was a quick look at many of the features in Lightroom 4's print module. My name is Julieanne Kost, thanks for watching. [Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4] [Crew Kush Amerasinghe, Erik Espera, Karl Miller, Presenter Julieanne Kost] [tv.adobe.com/evangelist/julieanne-kost]