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[The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost]
Hi, and welcome.
My name's Julieanne Kost, and in today's episode of the Complete Picture,
we're going to talk about some kind of advanced tips and tricks
in the print module.
Now, if you want an overall view of what you can do in the print module,
we've already recorded that episode.
So, if you want that, and that's what you're looking for,
just go to Adobe TV and click on the Channels button,
and then you'll notice that there's a Lightroom Tutorials area.
If you click on that, then you'll see the Learn Lightroom 3.
And if we just click on the Learn Lightroom 3 button,
the one that you want to see, the video you want to watch,
is Lightroom: Print the Perfect Image.
That will take you through all of the different options in the print module.
But there were a few things that I wasn't able to get to
and a few things that I've learned since I recorded that.
So, let's go ahead and take a look at what they are.
All right. The first thing is, I didn't know to get to the print module
you can just do Command or Control P,
just like you do in any other application to print.
That will take you to the print module.
The second question that I always get about the print module,
because people see how many folders I have here of different print templates,
they want to know how I'm organizing those.
And it is a little odd in Lightroom, but when you click the plus icon,
you can see that you can name your template to create a template,
like once you set it up and you want to save it,
but right down here where it says folder,
that's actually where you would scroll up and create a new folder
so that you could create little folders for all of the print templates that go in them.
So, we don't need to do that right now,
but you should know that that's how I organize everything over here in the template browser.
In fact, if we scroll down, I actually have one that we'll be working with today.
So, let's click on this first template.
Now, it's not quite right, but it should give you a good idea
that I want to print 5 images up.
But I don't actually want to print these to paper.
I want to use this on my blog.
Well, if we go over here on the right-hand side under Print Job,
you'll notice that I've got it set not to print to a printer
but to set it up to a JPEG file.
And although that feature's been in there for a while,
I find that not very many people know about it.
Once I've set this up to print to a JPEG,
I can go ahead and add my sharpening.
I can tell it what JPEG quality I want
depending on the file size, so I could set it to 100%.
It would give me the best-looking image,
but if I lower this down to 90, I'm going to cut off about a third of my file size.
If you bring it down to 80, you'll cut off even more than that,
but sometimes you can start seeing a little bit of a decrease in quality.
So, it just depends on how big of a file size you want,
which really depends on how long you think that the person that comes to your blog
or to your website will actually stay there and wait for the image to load.
All right. Below that, you'll notice custom file dimensions.
So, I have my file resolution set to 72 ppi.
That's as low as it will go here,
and I've got my custom file dimensions to be 4 inches high by 13½ inches wide.
That just seemed to be a good size when you multiply this out.
Of course, if you wanted to do easier math,
I guess you could set your resolution to 100 pixels per inch.
But the smallest you can actually go for inches is 4 inches,
so that's 400 pixels, which is small enough for most people on the Web.
Okay, lastly, if you are going to print something out like this and print it to the Web,
you want to make sure that you go to color management
and change your profile to sRGB.
And then when you select "Print to file" right here,
this sometimes is a little bit confusing, and I'll just go to my desktop,
and we'll create a new folder, and I'll just call this "For my blog" for right now.
So, "For my blog," and hit "Create."
And it's going to ask me to "Save As."
And what I didn't point out to you was that I have a lot of images here.
I have enough images to actually fill 3 pages of this.
So whatever I name my image right here, it's actually going to put a - 1, - 2, and - 3.
Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to go ahead and save this as just a test.
And we'll click "Save."
Now, because I'm printing these to a file,
Lightroom is not going to automatically import them, right?
If I want to see these new images that I've created,
let's go back to the Grid View by just tapping the G key,
and we'll click the "Import" button.
Then, I'm going to choose on my desktop this "For my blog" folder,
and let's go ahead and just add those files in place.
I'm not going to actually move them anywhere else around, but look.
There's actually a subfolder in here called "Test,"
and then you can see how it has named my files the same as that test folder.
So, when you go ahead and import these back in,
you might want to just do a quick rename.
So, we would just do a quick "Select All" and then go here under the library
and rename the photos, and then probably you have your own custom file naming template.
I know I have a bunch of them here,
but if I wanted to do a file naming convention of my own, I would go ahead and do this.
And I'm just going to start it, because I don't want to ruin anything else.
We'll just start it at 8,000 for right now, but I think you get the idea.
I actually need to go in there and rename these,
which leads me to another idea or topic.
What you could do now, of course, is add these to a publish service
so that you would know which images you've actually published to the blog.
But that's for another video.
For now, let's go back to the print module, Command or Control P,
and you'll notice that I don't have the right file selected,
which is not a problem because down here at the top of my film strip
I can see all of my recent sources, also my favorite sources,
so I can quickly navigate and go back to a different folder of images.
And of course, I could also use the Collections right over here
on the left-hand side to navigate.
Okay, let's go ahead and move to our next template here.
This is very, very basic.
I simply have a 2-page spread.
If we go to the layout style, you can see that I'm using the custom package.
This image is cropped to a square, so let's go ahead and drag it in there.
And then we can go ahead and drag in these other images
into our template.
It doesn't really matter for now which ones go where because this isn't really the point.
The point is when I get to this stage,
what I'd really like is I'd like this image, this big image on the left,
to also be on the right, but I want it to be screened back.
And you'll notice that I actually have another cell there, right?
That's what we call all the--kind of the frames
that we're dragging and dropping our images into.
I will tell you, sometimes it's a little tricky to get a cell.
I'm going to tap the delete key for right now just to show you how I would do this
because my page setup right down here--
you'll notice I'm printing again to a JPEG--
my page setup--my custom file dimensions are 12 to 12.
What I would do is up here under the cell size,
I would just click 12 to 12.
But what that does is it says "Hey, there's other content on these other pages,
so I'm going to make a new page."
Well, now it makes it really easy for me just to select this cell,
and then I can drag it over here to this one.
Then I no longer need this extra page, so we can get rid of that.
I think that's a little bit easier than just clicking to add a small cell
and then dragging it out because sometimes I can't quite get it to the edges that way.
Although, when you do have a double-page spread,
you'll notice there's a little option up here to zoom the page,
which will allow you to zoom into one of the pages when you have a double-page spread
or however many pages you have showing.
Okay, so with that one targeted,
I'm not going to drag in this image,
but what I'm going to do is I'm going to tap the D key.
That's going to take me to the develop module.
Now, once I'm in the develop module, I'm going to create a virtual copy,
and I'm going to do that by using Command or Control on Windows.
And although the image looks the same here in the preview area,
you'll notice down here at the bottom, I actually have 2 thumbnails.
Now, how am I going to screen back this image without going to Photoshop?
It's very, very easy.
I'm going to use the Tone Curve option, and I've got it set to Point Curve.
So, by default, it actually looks like this.
If you want to change your Tone Curve to the Point Curve,
you have to click down here to the right of where it says "Linear."
That will take you to the Point Curve.
Now you can grab that point and simply drag it up to screen back your image.
Excellent. Let's go back to the print module, Command or Control P.
You can see my original and my virtual copy.
We just drag the virtual copy into the background there,
but it comes on top because I just made it.
Not a problem. We will just send that to the back.
I just was right mouse clicking there to send that to the back.
Of course, on the Mac, if you only have a one-button mouse, it's Control,
click on the frame or the cell.
Excellent. Okay, let's move to my next template right here.
And let's talk a little bit about identity plates.
So, I'm going to go down to my page area,
and I'll click to turn on an identity plate.
Well, this is great if I just want a signature somewhere, like underneath these 2 images.
I can go ahead and just add a single identity plate.
But there's 2 other options.
One of them says "Render on every image," and one of them says "Render behind images."
Well, rendering on every image would--let's scale that up--
it would show the identity plate on every single image.
Well, if I wanted to add a really cool edge effect,
I could go ahead and create the edge file in Photoshop
and then define it as an identity plate and render it on top of every image.
So, let's go see what I have here as far as identity plates.
I'll choose to edit it, and we're going to use a graphical identity plate.
All I need to do is I need to locate this file.
And you can see that I have a 5 by 5 inch edge file.
Now, it's only at 150 pixels per inch because when you start importing big files
at like 300 pixels per inch, that can make Lightroom go a little bit slower.
So, I've just brought down the edge file because it's only an edge.
It's not holding a ton of detail that I need.
I've lowered that down to 150 pixels per inch,
but I can't use the PSD file.
But it is a PSD file because all of this area needed to be transparent,
so this is my layered PSD file.
This is my PNG file, so it's the same document, but it's saved as a PNG.
When I select "Choose" and then click "Okay"--
well, actually, I'd probably want to save this because if I don't save it--
well, I want to save it so that when I save the template,
it also knows the exact identity plate that I used.
So, we'll use "Save As," and we'll save this as
"The Complete Picture adding edge identity plate."
Excellent. I'll click "Save," hit "Okay,"
and you'll see that it has placed that, although it has only placed it at 99%,
so let's just scoot that up to 100%, and now I've got great edge effects on every single image.
So, that's when you would use the option to render an identity plate on every image.
But what about this render behind image?
Well, people always ask me "How would you print out your images
on top of like a template for your studio?"
So let's say, for example, you want something like this
where you can then drag and drop images into each of the cells
so every time a different client comes in, you're going to fill the cells with their image.
But behind all of the cells that I'm filling, you can see I basically have a template.
It's got my little logo up here.
It's got an extra line.
I mean, this is just a graphic.Yours could include anything.
It's a PSD file.
Photography by Julieanne, all of that, that whole background
was created in Photoshop, and then if we scroll down here to identity plate,
we can actually see that identity plate.
And all I have done is instead of rendering it on every image, because that would look silly,
I've rendered it behind every image.
And if we go and we look at this by clicking on this little downward pointing triangle right here
and choosing Edit, you can see that I have just located as this file
this full background PSD as my file.
It will warn you, but I'm going to tell it to use it anyway.
When I click "Okay," that is the background that I get.
All right, excellent.
One more thing. Let's go down to this picture package layout.
And the only reason that I really want to show this to you
is just to let you know that Lightroom really is doing the right thing
as far as sharpening goes.
Everybody asks me "Do I need to sharpen in Photoshop?"
"Do I need to take those files to Photoshop?"
If you want to do some selective sharpening that's maybe beyond
the selected sharpening you can do in Lightroom's develop module,
then yes, by all means, you can go to Photoshop and do your sharpening.
But you should know that when you click on Print Sharpening here
and you enter in your media type, whether you're going to glossy or matte,
and when you enter in the amount of sharpening you want,
not only do we change the amount of sharpening for each different sized image,
so each one of these smaller images is going to get a smaller amount of sharpening
than the large image, we're also taking into consideration things like
how big the original image was and what you've scaled it down to.
So, we really are doing a lot of complex stuff underneath the hood
that you might know about, so I would definitely encourage you to try out the sharpening
in Lightroom, and that might help you alleviate a step of going over to Photoshop.
Also, as far as file resolution goes, if I was printing this directly to a printer,
I actually turn off the print resolution right here.
And again, I hand over to Lightroom the print resolution
so that Lightroom can do the right thing.
The only reason that you'd really want to turn this on
is if you have a specific print resolution that you've created in Photoshop,
and you don't want Lightroom to change that to interpolate it up
for the printer driver, but I am perfectly happy letting Lightroom
interpolate up my images to the necessary size in order to print them.
And then I'll just mention one more thing, and that is this Print One button
because it always threw me.
I never hit "Print One" because I thought, well, print one.
Well, this is page 1 of 16. I didn't know if it would just print
like 1 of the first page or if it would print one copy of all of them,
and so I always went to Print.
But the problem with choosing Print--I mean, if you've already set up your page setup
and your printer settings, and if you have any questions about that,
again, it's in that first video.
I walk through all of that.
But if you don't want to see all those options because you've already set it up,
then just hit "Print One," because Print... means hey, a dialog box is going to come up,
and I don't want to see this dialog box, because if I've already set up my settings,
I don't want to be able to change it because if they were already working,
and I've saved them as a template, why would I want to bring up a dialog box
where I could make a mistake?
So, if you just hit "Print One," it will just print one copy,
but it will print one copy of, of course, all of the images here
that you have in your film strip because you've told it to make all of those images.
Excellent. So, I hope that clarifies some of the questions that I seem to get a lot
about the print module, and I hope it enables you to create your own custom templates
and gives you some new ideas for working with Lightroom.
My name's Julieanne Kost. Thanks for joining me on this episode of "The Complete Picture.'
[♪ Music ♪]
[Adobe TV Productions]
