Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating a Layout for Books

If you ever want to make your images available to people or services or whatever, as JPEGs, you just simply highlight the group of images you wanna send out, go to the Export Dialog box and I have a preset already set up inside of my Digital Deliveries folder, which is a high resolution sRGB JPEG. So I click on it, and it sends it to my desktop in a folder called High Resolution Images. So I, it's, the folder's already set up as part of that preset and then the name says File Name dash Artists Name, which is me, so Jared Platt, so that way, when I send them places, the name of the photo has the name of the photo plus Jared Platt so people know it's from me. I also make sure that when I send it out, it's 100 percent quality and that there is no size changes. That way, they have the full resolution image and then I make sure that my copyright is intact inside of it, so that they know who it's from. That way if it ever got straight out somewhere, if someone really wanted to find me, like,...

if you found my image of a house or a building or whatever and you're like, "I need to use this," then honestly, if you wanted to do it honestly, you would look and you would open it in Photoshop and go to Info and it would say Jared Platt copyright and they would actually have my website in there and you'd go, "Oh, I can just contact him." Right? So it gives you the ability to contact me. I don't watermark it because I want people to be able to use it for whatever purpose I'm sending it to and I hit Export. And once I hit Export, it's going to send all those images out as JPEGs. I could choose to send them out as TIFFs, or as PFDs, et cetera. One note. If you're ever gonna edit your images in Photoshop, they need to go out as a PSD or TIFF. They need to be 16-bit, not eight-bit. 16-bit, and they need to be pro-photo RGB. If you're sending them out to go to the web, they have to be sRGB. 'cause sRGB is the color space on the web. That's what people see. If you send them out as something else, when they get on the web, they're gonna look weird. They're gonna look really bad. So sRGB is the correct color space to go to the web, or to go to print. So send them as sRGB. That's like the dumbed down color space of the world. Okay. So that's all we need to say about exporting to actual image files. So now we're gonna make a book of my portfolio. And so I wanna make a book that I can put as a coffee table book in my studio, something like that. All I need to do is highlight all of my images here, and I'm gonna make a collection here. Right-click here and create a collection, and I'm gonna call this Portfolio Book. And I'm gonna put a little tag at the front so I can find it on my... There. So I can find it on my iPad as well. So it's easier to find stuff if you have some kind of a code to get it in the right place. 'cause everything on the iPad is in alphabetical order, pretty much. And so you wanna find it, you gotta have some way of organizing it. So I'm gonna click it and I'm gonna include every one of these photos and I can do two things. I can either just include the photos or I can make virtual copies. If I include virtual copies, that means anything I do to these could be specific to the book and they won't change the originals. 'cause it's making a fake duplicate of them. So I'm gonna include virtual copies. And then I'm going to sync it with Lightroom Mobile and hit Create. And by doing that, I now have a new collection that has all the images that I wanna use in the book and if I, if I go to that collection, just waiting for it to finish. There it is. So once it's there, if I decide, you know what? I don't want certain images. I don't want, say, this image in it. So I'm gonna click on it and delete it. I didn't delete it from Lightroom. I just deleted it from this collection. And so I'm just gonna kinda scan through and go, okay, yeah, that's about right. Those are the images... Oh, you know what? I only want... I don't want all of these images in there. I just want the one of the dog and the girl studying and that's about it because I don't, and I like this one here. Okay. Oh, and I don't want the family playing or going to school. There. So now I've kind of whittled down my portfolio so I don't have to have so many of the same thing. Once I'm done with that, then I'm gonna just go over to the Book Module which is right over her at the top, I click on Book, and it's gonna take me in to the Book Module where I can design a book. First thing I wanna do is create, and by the way, we have an entire class on the Book Module, and there's a lot to learn so I'm just gonna show you the very basics of how to deal with this and then you can go play. So I'm gonna show you how to work it and what to do, but once you really wanna get into that, go ahead and check out the Book Module. Yes? I was just gonna say the name of the class-- Name of the class, please. Is Create a Blurb Photobook with Jared Platt. There's even a couple other classes on blurb photobooks with Dan Milner, but in design, but the one with Jared is Create a Blurb Photobook in Lightroom. Awesome. And then I also got one called Scrapbooking for Digital... For... No, it's Lightroom for Scrapbookers, I think. And in that one, we talk about all sorts of storytelling and how to tell stories and how to design the book and all the ins and outs and stuff like that, so there's a lot of classes on this subject, but I want to give you the basics. So we're gonna go through here. The first thing that I wanna do is I wanna create a cover. And so I'm just gonna create a... I'm just gonna scan through, and let's just make my cover say... Oh, what shall it be? What shall it be? Let's do this one. No, I want a square one. Let's do this one. Okay, so I'm gonna grab this. This is the cover. If I click down here, I can either show a grid, I can show the spread, or an individual image. So if I click on grid, you'll see that I got covers, the front page and the back page. That's all I get at the very beginning. So then I'm gonna grab the cover and drag it up to the top and I've got my image on the cover. And then I'm going to look for something in the back. I'm just gonna, maybe place an image of, um... Let's just do an image from London. So I'm gonna click on that and drag it to the back. Okay so now I can go in a do the spread and take a look at it. Now, if you look at this, it's got some kind of a little warning right there. So this photo is offline, can't be found, and it will be omitted from my book. And the reason is is it can't find that image and so if I click E and go to it, I can see that as a Smart preview, but in order to make a book, it wants the original file, especially when it wants to make something this big. It's like, I'm not gonna try and print that for you 'cause Blurb doesn't wanna print something that's decent quality, it wants to print the high quality. But I can still design the book and then I just, I just send it to print when I'm connected to all the files. So let's go back to the Book Module and let's just take this and we're going to right-click it and Zoom to Fill. So now I've got my image and that's the book cover. And now I'm gonna add text to the cover, so I'm gonna scroll down here to the text area and I'm gonna add phototext to this cover. So I'm just gonna click on here and I'm going to go like this and delete that text and type in, uh... Jared Platt. And I'm going to highlight that and I'm gonna come down to the actual Text area and you have the same text options that you have in Photoshop and InDesign all that. You still have that same engine in here. So I'm gonna click on this and click there. Light gray looks good. If I wanna change the color of the text, I can actually grab it. Well, let's do this first. Before we do that, let's take this, grab it and drag it up to the top and then let's change the size of it. And then let's put it where we want. So you can come up to the padding and change how far it is from the edge and then I kinda wanna drag it back down just a little bit. There. So now I can see what it looks like. There we go. Jared Platt. So there's my name. And now I can go ahead and come back down here and change the opacity of that. So that's just kind of a scaled back version there. That looks pretty good 'cause it's showing that blue through. If I wanna change the color, all I have to do is go back to that character color right there, and click on it, and then I can grab it and drag it off and you know, point at the red lighthouse. I can point at the blue water and it will change the color of the text based on where I'm pointing. So I've chosen the lighthouse light and then I'm gonna come through here and change the opacity until it looks right. There, I've designed my cover. Now, I wanna, I don't want a big, white spine on this book and so I'm gonna click on the cover itself, go down to the very bottom, and I'm gonna turn on a background color and I'm gonna click on this and click on the Chooser, and then I'm gonna go in and color it the same color as that sky. There. So now the background is not going to be this weird... See how it fits now? So this one, I'm gonna right-click this one and I'm gonna... Actually I wanna make this smaller. So instead of clicking and zooming it out, I'm gonna zoom it in. I'm gonna go up to the padding and just grab the padding and drag it in like that. And by the way, you can unlink the padding here so that instead of all of them working together, you can say unlink. Then you can take the bottom and move it up. So that it's like a tiny file right up there. And then I can add some more text here and I can say Photography... Oops. Photography by Jared Platt. Oops. By Jared Platt. Highlight everything, change the size of it so that it's a normal sized font. Just something simple and small, and then, I can actually tell this, instead of being in the photograph, I can tell it to be below the photograph in the Text option areas. So if I click below, it puts it below the photograph and then I can tell it to, instead of being on the left-hand justified, come down here and say I want you to be right-justified. Let's actually change this to about a 12, 14 point font. There we go. And now that's what that cover looks like. Got it? So we've made the cover. And I can also type stuff in the spine if I want, et cetera. So I've made the cover and now I'm gonna start filling this book. So the way I fill the book, I can do two things. The first way to fill the book that would be really, really fast is to highlight everything. So just go ahead and highlight the entire thing there like that, and then you would come into the top area here, and you would choose a preset for auto layout. So if you click here, One Photo Per Page Right. Let me show you what that looks like. Go here. One page per photo. And I'm going to... So I can choose each page. I can say I want a fixed layer on this page and I want it to be like a tiny photo in the middle. So I can just say I want this to look like, like that on this side, and then on the right side, I want a big one. Or I can say, you know what? I want it blank on the left-hand side. Or even better, fixed layout. I want there to be text, a full page of text on the left side of every page. Every left page, I can write on it. And then on the right-hand page, I want one photograph that I'm gonna talk about in the left-hand page. So if that's the case, I gotta choose what kind of, what kind of design I want. And so I can choose either a fixed layout or I can say I random layout and if I just say I want a random layout from one photo per page, and it would just randomize that one photo, different types of pages. But I don't like to do that. I like to keep things fairly consistent, so I'm gonna choose this photo here and I'm gonna fill it. I'm not gonna add any extra text or anything to it and I'm gonna go ahead and hit Save. And it's gonna ask me what do you want to do that, and I'm gonna call it Text Left Photo Right. So that's the design. Hit Create. So now you can see that I've got this Auto Layout preset right there, and then if I auto layout, so I'm gonna click Auto Layout and it's gonna go (makes rolling sound) and it's building me a book. There you go. See it just built the book and now I can go through and talk about this one. Now see how it auto-zoomed in on all of these? So I don't want it to be auto-zoomed in so I can right-click and uncheck Zoom Photo To Fill and now it's gonna fit it in there. But if I liked the square, I can grab it and drag it down and now that's gonna be the way it looks. If I wanna change that layout, I can click on the layout itself and use this little toggle down here, click on it, and say I want this to be a full bleed. Click on it, and now it's a full bleed. But notice that it gives me the same error, because that is an image that doesn't have the original file. So as soon as it gets too big for the Smart preview to actually print a really great file, Blurb is saying no go. You send us the original file, okay? But with small ones like this one, it can take 'em. So this one I want it to actually right-click and I wanna be like that. And I can grab it and drag it to the side like that, so now, this one is a really great design because it's got text over here and then it's Sadie over here. Right? So that's great. That's a perfect way to do that. And so I can just keep... And then if I wanna reorganize something, I can certainly take the entire spread and I can move it so that it's over here. Or I can could take two spreads that work together, so like, let's say I wanted to work on these two images together, I could take this one and drag it over here so now I have two spreads of her and then I have two blank pages here to type on. And when I type on 'em, I can just go into the Full Page editor, grab some text from a Word document, you know, poetry, or whatever you wanna do. You can get some Jack Kerouac poetry and put it in (laughing) connection to your photographs. But you can just type here. Type Your Story. Or you can make just headings. So if you want to, you can come down here to the Text area and say I want to put this in the center of the page so we center it left and right and we center it up and down and then we can change the character to nice and big and make the text kind of a gray and then, there we go, so that when we design our book, we have these cool little areas where we have you know, if I put this back the way it was, now when you look at that, you have this cool heading for each photo on the right-hand side. But do you see how quick it was? We designed our cover and we autofilled our book. But you can also grab an image so if you're, if you if you want to change something, you can grab this image, say this one here, and drag it on to a page. You can't drag it on to a text page, so if I want to drag it on to this page, I would change it from a text page to a photo page and then I would, let's say I wanted two photos on a page, I could do that one and now I could come in and say, I'm gonna put this photo on this page and I'm gonna put this photo on this page. Now, we have a problem. The problem is, first off, I don't want it to the have these, the images numbers here, so I'm gonna delete those. But the other problem is is that if I look at this page, see how it's got the pyroaxe issue all fixed out? So, if I... I can design a whole book before I've done any editing. This is great, so if you're a wedding photographer, you can design the album or the book for your client inside of Blurb, before you ever do any retouching. And then once your client says, "Yep, that's the way to do it," then you can go and retouch your images and they automatically get put into the Blurb book. So for instance here, if I wanna work on this, all I have to do is click on the Develop Module. It's gonna take me to that image in the Develop Module. I'm gonna go under the Crop and say constrain the crop and I'm going to make sure that it, it looks the way I want it to look, and then once I'm done... Oh, I need to constrain the crop a little bit more because it's creeping in on the top. There. So now I don't have that problem anymore. And if I go back to the Book Module, it's fixed. Already. I don't have to synchronize it, it just is. So everything's just ever-present all the time inside of the Book Module, even if you're working on stuff. And the great things is, then you can say, oh, these two don't match. Oh, that's okay because I can shift-click both of them, go back to the Develop module and I've got both images selected inside of here, still, even though I was just in the Book module. And I'm gonna go to the black and white settings. Pan both of them black and white, and then I'm gonna go into the black and white curves and then I'm gonna... I'm gonna reset those and I'm gonna bring the... These up, so the warms up and the cool down. Like that. There we go. So I've just adjusted both of those and if I want to, I can also go to the Library module and use the relative adjustments because I don't know what adjustments were made to both of these images. And so I can go to the Quick Develop and start bringing up, say, the exposure just a little bit more, and I can add a little more clarity to them and I can bring the black back down a couple notches. On both of them, but it's relatively doing it. So I don't know what the other image has in it, but once I look at them both, they look pretty good except for one thing. You see my problem? One has a sepia look and the other one doesn't. So I have to go over to a preset of some sort because there's, somehow there's a tone curve here that's normal. See that, there's a normal tone curve and then on this one, it's a different tone curve. So I can either go to a preset and get a preset that works for both of them or I can just turn it off of Auto Sync, turn on the Sync button, and just Check None and then take the tone curve and synchronize it over to this one. And now both of them have the same tone curve on them, right? So then once I'm done with that then go back to the Book Module and both of them have everything done. So, practicing make, or making a book inside of the Book module is... This is a horrible spread, by the way. It makes no sense. Because I... (laughing) I need to change this. So I'm gonna go and grab something else. Oh, look. I don't have anything else from Prague. So instead of doing this book, I'm gonna go back to the Library module and I'm gonna go find an image from Prague. So I'm just gonna go to my Prague images and I could also just go to every image and search for something but since I know where they are, I'm just gonna go to my Prague workshop and I'm gonna go and grab my final set of images and I'm gonna look for something else that I like that's from Prague. There. I like this image. So I'm gonna take this image here and I'm gonna go down to that same collection, Portfolio Book, drag it in there. So now when I go back here and go back to the Book module, I have these images and this image and I can grab it and replace that image and how I have that image from Prague. Right-click it, zoom to fill, reframe it. And by the way, see all those birds? Those birds were actually created inside of Lightroom by merging three files as an HDR that were all the same. So I didn't actually have any difference between the files. So I just went boom, boom, boom, and the birds were flying and I just took all three images, even though they weren't different, different exposures, and I merged them as an HDR and it added all the birds. So originally, there were only like five birds. And I just added all the birds inside of lightroom without ever going to Photoshop. So that's pretty cool, right? So, anyway. So I added those. I had to go in here, though. See how that building has those little round spires and then there's another part over here? This part doesn't actually exist. It's only this part, but because it went like, I had to like mess with it, then I went to Photoshop to use the Content Aware Fill and I filled it and it gave me this part. So like, literally this is some kind of a duplication of that. So that's, it's a TIFF document for that reason. So if you wanted your image to go across the gutter, maybe one quarter on the other page, can you do that? Yeah, let's do it. So we go back to the grid. And we're gonna change this spread because we want to have an actually double-truck spread. That's what that's called. So we're gonna click on here and we're gonna do into our Page area and we're gonna add a blank page. Let's add two just so that we have some space. And then I'm gonna go into that page and I'm gonna do, instead of a one page, I'm gonna go to a two page spread and I'm gonna click on... Let's do this type, right? Let's do this one here. Okay? So now it's one big spread so I can grab this image and drag it there. And then right-click it, Zoom To Fill, and now it's going to run across there. And if I want more space on it I can go in and grab that one and then I'm gonna not Zoom To Fill it and drag it over here and now I've got that. All right? Good to go? Does it compensate for bleeds? For the printer. Yah, so it's always compensating for the bleeds. It's figuring that out. It knows what's Blurb's bleeds are and what their crops and their trims are and all that kind of stuff. You don't have to think about it. You're just looking at what it's gonna look like in the end. It's figuring out the rest. Okay? So, but you can also turn on those kind of zones. So if you go right here, the Guides, you can click on it and it'll show you all of the zones and the safe zones and stuff like that. But it won't let you type outside the safe zone anyway. So, yeah. And so, now, once I'm done with this book, all I need to do is... And by the way, if you go up here right before you start your book, you make sure that you choose Blurb. 'cause you good choose PDF or JPEG, and then send it out as like a PDF book, or as a JPEG, so that you could send it somewhere else, I suppose? Um, but, you can also choose the different types or sizes of books, and you can choose hardcover or softcover, and you can choose Premium Luster. My very favorite is the ProLine Uncoated. That's my favorite paper because it's just thick, it's tough, it's toothy, it's great. And if you wanna use it as a book that you can write in, that's a great writing paper. So I love that paper. The Premium Matte is good. I don't necessarily like the Premium Lustre. So I would change it to ProLine Uncoated, probably, for this book, and then it shows you an estimated price for the book, which is $111, and if I choose to take off their logo, then it goes up about 10 or so bucks. But then I've got a book and now I come here, and I go to Send a Blurb like this. And it will tell me, oh, sorry, you've got some issues here. So there's some transparency issues and there's some images that are too low-res, so we won't do it now, but we'll do it later. But I can just hit Send a Blurb and it will, it'll, you'll just see a status bar over on the left-hand side, and it will be uploading the Blurb and as soon as it's done, it will open a web page with that book, and you can order it.