In a post last year I explained a process for exporting images from Lightroom (http://digital-photography-school.com/output-from-lightroom-to-your-blog) sized and all ready for posting to a blog. Since then I discovered a more robust solution to the problem of outputting images using a custom print layout from Lightroom. This can be used when printing images or saving them as jpeg files.
The process of preparing and outputting images can be simplified by taking advantage of the Single Image/Contact Sheet Layout in Photoshop and combining this with a print collection. The result is that printing to a specific layout is as easy as dropping the image into a collection and switching to the Print module and clicking to print – it’s a simple process once it is all setup.
To do so, start out by selecting an image to use to configure your print layout and click to launch the Print module. In the top right panel select Layout Style: Single Image/Contact Sheet. The image which appears on the page is the one selected in the filmstrip.
Set up this image so that it looks the way you want to print all images of this type. If you plan to print the image to paper, click Page Setup and select your printer and the page size and orientation.
To print to a file, open the Print Job panel and from the Print to dropdown list select JPEG file. Deselect the Draft Mode Printing checkbox, select Custom File Dimension and set the output dimensions and file resolution.
Adjust the image size and placement on the page using the Image Settings and Layout panel options. You can also add an Identity Plate and/or Watermark as desired.
Once you are done, click the Create Saved Print button at the top right of the screen above the print layout and type a name for your new collection. This saves the image and the layout as a special Print collection in the Collections panel.
In future to set up images ready to print them, add them to this collection in the Library module, double click the collection in the Collections panel and it will automatically launch the Print module.
Click on any image in the filmstrip and the image will be assembled ready to print or save to a jpeg file.
A number of readers have asked me for solutions to outputting images with watermarks in different positions and using different text colors from Lightroom. If you’re outputting to jpeg files or printing images you can do this using this process. Set up a print collection for each of the watermark options. You can then drop the images into the appropriate collection and they’ll be automatically laid out ready for printing. The layouts are saved in the collection so simply selecting the collection automatically recreates your layout.
Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.
Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.
How to Harness the Power of Lightroom Print Collections
The post How to Harness the Power of Lightroom Print Collections by Helen Bradley appeared first on Digital Photography School.
The main benefit of Lightroom’s Library module is that it gives you the tools you need to get organised and speed up your workflow. The end result is that you can spend more time in the Develop module – the place where you creatively process your photos.
The best way to get organised is by using Collections and Collection Sets. There seem to be as many ways of using Collections as there are photographers. I’m going to look at two in this article. The first uses Collections, and the second Smart Collections. Together they will give you an insight into how you can use Collections to improve your workflow.
Why use Collections?
You may be wondering why you should use Collections in Lightroom instead of the Folders panel. Here’s why:
1. The Folders panel is only available in the Library module.
The Collections panel is accessible from every module. Adobe wants you to use the Collections panel as it is the most practical way to organise your images.
2. Collections and Collection Sets give you far more freedom than the Folders panel.
The contents of the Folders panel mirrors the file structure of your hard drive. Let’s say you take a photo of a friend called Amy in Hong Kong. In the Folders panel, that photo can only exist in one place – the physical folder where it has been saved on your hard drive.
However, the same file can be stored in as many Collections as you like. It could be part of a Collection called ‘Amy’, another called ‘Hong Kong’, perhaps another called ‘Favourite photos’. There is no limit to the number of Collections you can add it to.
It’s a little like using Playlists in iTunes. You can add a song to as many Playlists as you like. It’s the same in Lightroom with photos and Collections.
Organise your images
Hopefully you’re now beginning to see just how flexible and convenient Collections are. Now let’s take a look at how you can use them to organise your images.
Other photographers’ methods
When it comes to learning how to use Lightroom, don’t feel that you have to figure everything out yourself. There are plenty of outstanding websites dedicated to using Lightroom, and lots of photographers who share the way they work for others to use. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel – just find a way that works for you and tweak it to suit your needs.
In that spirit, I’m going to look at two methods for using Collections I learnt from other photographers.
Technique 1: Using multiple Collections
This technique is based on a method I read about on Scott Kelby’s blog. I like it because it’s simple, and the easiest way that I’ve found to narrow down the images you take in a shoot to the ones that you want to process. The quicker you can do that, the sooner you can move on to the Develop module. Here’s a brief description of how it works:
Create a Collection Set and give it a name relevant to the shoot (i.e. the name of the place where the photos were taken, or the person in the photos etc.)
Create three Collections inside that Collection Set. Name them Full Shoot, Picks and Selects.
Send all the photos from the shoot to the Full Shoot Collection.
Flag your favourite photos from the Full Shoot Collection and send them to the Picks Collection. You don’t have to be really selective at this stage. You’re eliminating the worst images rather than picking the best.
Use flags to mark your best photos from the Picks Collection and send them to the Selects Collection. This is where you get really picky – the aim is to select only the very best photos from the shoot, the ones you intend to process.
Of course, you can adapt this to you own needs. If you don’t take many photos during a shoot, you may only need two Collections to narrow them down. On the other hand, if you want to convert some of your photos to black and white, you could create an additional Collection to hold those images.
As you can see, I ended up creating five Collections for the above shoot.
The process is outlined in full here.
Technique 2: Using Smart Collections
The previous technique relies on you adding photos to each Collection manually. But it’s also possible to use Smart Collections that Lightroom populates automatically. Photographer Rob Knight has the following system:
Create a Collection Set – give it a relevant name (in Rob’s example he uses ‘Landscape’).
Create two Smart Collections inside the Collection Set. Rob names his ‘Landscape picks’ and ‘Landscape stars’. All he has done here is add the words ‘picks’ and ‘stars’ to the name of his Collection Set. The article (link below) explains what rules to set.
Go to the Folder containing the images, and flag the best as picks. They are sent automatically to the ‘Landscape picks’ Smart Collection.
Go to the ‘Landscape Picks’ Smart Collection and give the best images a one star rating. Lightroom adds them to the ‘Landscape stars’ Smart Collection. This Smart Collection contains the best images from the shoot.
You can read about it here.
Over to you
If you have an interesting way to use Collections yourself, then why not leave a comment? I would love it if readers could share some of their ideas – I’m also curious to see how other people use Collections.
Mastering Lightroom Book One: The Library Module
My latest ebook Mastering Lightroom Book One: The Library Module is a complete guide to using Lightroom’s Library module to import, organise and search your photo files. You’ll learn how to tame your growing photo collection using Collections and Collection Sets, and how to save time so you can spend more time in the Develop module processing your photos.
Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.
Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.
Use Lightroom Collections to Improve your Workflow
The post Use Lightroom Collections to Improve your Workflow by Andrew Gibson appeared first on Digital Photography School.
This week as part of our ‘Best of dPS 2012 series‘ I thought it might be fun to look back on some of our most popular ‘image collections’ of the year gone by.
We post image collections 1-2 times a month to act as a source of inspiration and ideas for our readers. Each is on a different theme or technique of photography and where we can we include a little instruction on how to tackle shooting the types of photos covered.
Here’s the top 15 image collections of 2012 (click the image to see the full collection).
1. 24 Beautiful Dawn Images
2. 33 Inspirational Images that Feature Patterns and Repetition
3. 27 Resplendent ‘Reflections’ Images to Inspire You
4. 25 Evocative Images of Abandonment and Urban Decay
5. 27 Beautiful Black and White Portraits
6. 27 Black and White Landscape Images
7. Moon Games
8. 31 Amazing Abstract Images
9. 25 Dreamy Images Shot Wide Open
10. 27 Signs Images
11. 29 Stunning Staircase Images
12. 29 Shots of Dogs Sticking Their Heads out of Car Windows [Humor]
13. 47 City Skylines to Inspire You
14. 27 Great Panning Images [and How to Take Them]
15. 19 More Creative Mirror Self Portraits
Want more image collections? Check out our best Image Collections of 2011 here.
Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.
Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.
Lightroom has two types of collections: regular Collections and Smart Collections. Smart Collections are live and they are created as a result of filtering your photos according to rules that you write. You cannot add an image to a Smart Collection by dragging and dropping it into the collection. You can’t remove an image from a Smart Collection just because you don’t want it in there – it can only be removed if it fails to meet the criteria you set up for the collection.
Smart collections are a handy way to create collections and to manage your photos and here I’ll show you how to make use of them.
Shipped Smart Collections
There are a few Smart Collections which ship with Lightroom. To find these, click the Collections panel in Lightroom and click on the Smart Collection Set. Click the Smart collection called Without Keywords. As its name suggests, this collection shows you all the images in your Lightroom catalog that do not have keywords associated with them.
If you’re like me you’ll want to close this one pretty quickly – it can be scary to see just how many images aren’t keyworded!
You can learn more about this collection by right clicking its name and choose Edit Smart Collection. You’ll see that the Smart Collection is configured to contain all those images for which the Keywords property is empty.
There are other collections which are shipped with Lightroom including Recently Modified which is a collection of images that have been edited recently.
You can, if desired, change the Recently Modified Smart Collection to span a different number of days. Click this collection , right click and choose Edit Smart Collection. You can see that the collection criteria is set to be Edit Date > Is in the last
When you do so, Lightroom checks the images in your catalog to determine which images meet this criteria and it displays these in this Smart Collection.
Make your own Smart Collections
In addition to those shipped with Lightroom you can create your own Smart Collections. For example, if you color your images red meaning a certain thing you can create a Smart Collection that contains all the images which are colored red.
To do this, click to open the Collections panel, click the plus symbol and choose Create Smart Collection. Type a name for it such as Red Images, click Inside a Collection Set and choose to add it to the Smart Collections set. From the options below select Label color is red.
Click Create to create the collection – it will contain all images in your collection which have the red label color associated with them.
Remove an Image from a Smart Collection
The only way you can remove an image from a Smart Collection is to configure it so it no longer meets the criteria for the Smart Collection. For example an image will no longer appear in the Without Keywords collection if you add a keyword to it.
You can remove an image from the Red Images collection if you remove or change its color label. When it no longer has the red color label associated with it, it will no longer appear in the collection.
Similarly, if you apply the red color label to an image in Lightroom it will be automatically added to the Red Images Smart Collection.
One of the benefits of Smart Collections is that they’re continually updated by Lightroom. So Lightroom ensures that all the images which match the criteria you use to define the Smart Collection are in that collection.
How Smart Collections Differ from Regular Collections
Smart Collections behave differently to Regular Collections in a few key ways. One difference is that you cannot arrange images in a Smart Collection into your own custom order.
The collection order can only be set to one of the Lightroom default Sort Order options; Capture Time, Edit Order, Edit Time, Edit Count, Rating, Pick, Label Text, Label Color, File Name, File Extension, File Type and Aspect Ratio. Regular collections, on the other hand, can be sorted into User Order which is useful for slideshows and web pages for example.
You also cannot set a Smart Collection as the Target Collection because you cannot add images to a Smart Collection manually. It can only be added if it matches the criteria which describes that collection.
Over to you… Do you use Smart Collections in Lightroom and, if so, how do you use them? Do you use the shipped collections or make your own?
Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.
Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.
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