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Lesson Info

Creating Finalized Files and Printing

We're back with Lightroom Classic: The Complete Guide. Let's take a look at what we've done thus far. If this is your first day joining you should know that we've already gone through a few days, and on day one looked at an overview to kind of the big picture of Lightroom so we could get a sense for how's it different from other programs, and it really prepared us for the other days. So on day two we learned how to get our images into Lightroom, and also have to customize the interface so you're not stuck with the standard layout. Instead you can get it optimized for your particular purpose. On day three we talked about catalogs and folders. How many catalog files should you have, and how can you do a folder setup that can literally change the way you think about your images? If you've seen that lesson already you know what I'm talking about. Day four we showed you how to take your images from the RAW capture that your camera gave you and transform it using Lightroom's Develop settings...

into a much better looking image. Well, since wow we've done that, we've gone through those four days, today we're gonna talk about finalizing your files and printing. Because when you import your images into Lightroom and then you start making changes, the original files are untouched. And Lightroom is only recording what you do in text. It's just writing down where you moved the various adjustment sliders to. If we actually want to get an image that we can deliver to somebody else, we need to do something to get a finalized version of that file, and we do that through exporting. Let's jump in and get started in Lightroom. Here I have a folder of images that I would like to send to a friend. Maybe I need to create JPEG files to email to my wife, or maybe I need high quality TIFF files to send to a magazine. Well the problem is if I were to take one of these images and head over to the Develop module, everything I've done here in the Develop module is only recorded in the Lightroom catalog file as text. And so if I were to go to the bottom of the Develop module there's a choice called Reset, and that would show me what the original picture looked like. And I don't like that anywhere near as good as what I liked after my adjustments. In order to get a version of this file that incorporates those changes we need to do the following. We're going to go up to the File menu, and we have a bunch of choices here for exporting. You should know that the vast majority of the time, I would say 90+% of the time, I choose Export with Preset. And in here I've established a bunch of presets where all I need to do is choose one of these choices, like this one, let go, and then you'll see a progress bar in the upper left of Lightroom. When it's done there is a file, right now, sitting on my desktop that is the finalized version of this picture at the size that preset was setup for that's ready to deliver to anybody I'd like. All I did was went to the File menu, choose Export with Preset, and I can choose various sizes. Well the problem is when you get into Lightroom the only choices you'll have if you've never created export presets before are these ones up here called Lightroom Presets. Those are the ones that come with Lightroom. All the ones down here I had to create. So let's see how can you create these presets so in the future exporting will be as simple as choosing from this menu. Well, we have a choice called Export, and if I choose that it brings me into this screen. On the right side of this screen there's a whole bunch of settings. I'm going to collapse them down so we just see their headings, and let's take a look at how this is laid out. First on the left side of my screen these are presets I've made in the past. And when I'm gonna make a new once I glance at this list and I find the one that is closest to what I want. I'm gonna come over here and maybe click on this one. Any time I click on one of the presets on the left what it's doing is it's changing all the settings found on the right to show you what's contained within that preset. Then I only need to change whatever it is I want to deviate from that preset. Now if you don't have any presets listed here yet you're just gonna have these Lightroom ones, and they're not all that useful to start with. So you might have to start from scratch. But it's only gonna be your first preset where you start from scratch. After that you'll probably click in one on the left to just load in the basic settings, and then start to deviate from them. So let's take a look at all the settings on the right side of my screen. I'll just start at the top and work my way down. Here it first wants to know if you're gonna create a finalized version of this image, where should it be saved. And if I click here, here are common folders that I can use down here at the bottom. So if you want them to go to your desktop, this is an easy way to get them there. Or I can tell it to go to a specific folder. For instance, I have a folder called Portfolio for Projector and that's for images that have been scaled down to the same resolution as most projectors, which are 1920x1080 pixels, is the most common projector these days. And if I choose Specific folder I can tell it to go to that exact portfolio folder that I've established. I can tell it to save it into the same folder as the original file. I don't do that very often because most of the time these are delivery files that I plan on emailing to somebody, or somehow putting them on a disk and delivering them, and when I'm done, I don't keep a copy of them. I only keep a copy of the original file, and then I can always export it again if somebody else needed the same files. So it's not common for me to use this one. Then here's a choice called Choose folder later, and that means at the moment you export using the preset with that setting, it would ask you where do you want to put it. And therefore you just choose export with that preset and then you point it to the folder where you want it to go to. In this case I'm gonna put it on my desktop. That's my most common place of putting things because it's very easy to email from there. Then if you want to you could have it put into a subfolder. I do that on occasion but not all that often. One example of that is on occasion I will have a bunch of images that I want to put together into a time lapse sequence, where I took individual photos, that are like big, 42 megapixel images, and in the end I want to put them together into a time lapse. And so I'll just call this Time Lapse to Merge. And therefore it's gonna put it on my desktop and instead of having the clutter of maybe 200 pictures I'm about to export in that time lapse it's gonna create a brand new folder called Time Lapse to Merge and that's where it's gonna put them. So that's an optional choice. And then you can choose, do you want it to add it to this catalog after you're done exporting. Now for me, personally, I don't usually do that because I don't want to see two different copies of the same picture in this catalog. I only want to see the original one so it doesn't get too cluttered. But some people have different workflows, and if you wanted to you could have it added. I don't usually do that. Then there is a choice here, Add to Stack. That would be able to stack it with the original. But both of those are things that I don't usually use. Here it says Existing Files. What should it do, if in the folder you're telling it to save to, that file already exists, at least a file with the same name. Should it overwrite that image that's already in the folder? It's not gonna warn you if it does. You gotta be careful. Do you want it to skip it, assuming it's already there therefore you don't need two of them? Or should it get you to put a new name in so you can actually have two? I just have it set ask what to do because I don't want to assume it's going to have the file already existing there, and that's a nice reminder for me when it does happen. So here I'm doing my subfolder, Time Lapse to Merge, so that's what I'm basing this particular preset on. Next is the file naming. Now most of the time I just have that turned off and therefore it uses my original file name, and therefore if I send the file to a client and they end up giving me any comments back via email and they mention the name of the file, it's very easy for me to find it within Lightroom because that file matches what I used in Lightroom. But sometimes I don't want to reveal the original file name. Maybe the original file name includes the name of the client or model, and when I'm delivering this, maybe to a magazine or something else, I don't want them to know the model's name. And therefore I'm gonna have it here, automatically rename this to some sort of custom setting. In this case for a time lapse I might have it rename it. These are presets, the same presets that we created when we talked about importing images into Lightroom, so you're welcome to use any of those. If you choose Edit you can create a new preset from here. But I'm not gonna rename these. Continue working our way down. If we had video files selected, and this is a still photo, so this is grayed out, but if I had multiple images selected and one of them was a video, then this would be available and I'd simply be able to choose the file format to use. Below that we have file settings, and here for photographs, that's where you choose the file format, in this menu. And let's think about when do I want to use these various choices that are here. JPEG I usually use for convenience, if I'm just gonna email things and I want the convenience of a small file size while keeping relatively high quality. It's not common for me to use PSD unless it's a layered file to begin with, then I might use that. I would use TIFF if I need to send this to somebody and either they're gonna make extensive changes to the file afterwards or they want the utmost of quality. Because the TIFF file format does not the degrade the quality of your picture at all, whereas JPEG does. JPEG, you get the convenience of a small file, it lowers the quality a bit. So TIFF is used if I'm gonna send this to somebody else, maybe they're gonna do some retouching on the image, and then they're gonna send it back to me. TIFF would be a great format to use because it won't degrade the quality at all. DNG is Adobe's version of a RAW file. And I use that if I'm gonna be teaching. If I'm gonna be teaching and I need it to look like a RAW file but I don't want to send the original, full high-res image. Like my camera captures I think in 42 megapixels, and that's just a huge file to deliver for a class. And so I'll end up using DNG, and if I come in here and say Use Lossy Compression I can actually control the size if I do that. Or I can choose original, and I do that if I ever need a copy of the original file. Maybe I'm gonna teach with it, or maybe a client asks, "Can I have the original," either layered file or RAW file. I usually have an option for doing so. So in this case, since this is being done for time lapse, I'm gonna end up choosing JPEG. And I'm gonna get my quality really high, because if I'm gonna do a time lapse I don't want to be lowering the quality much at all. If this was for email or something else I'd probably have this set more like between 70 and as a good compromise between file size and quality. If you ever get a contest or a website that asks you submit images and it will say, "No larger than 48k," let's say, for your-- What they call it? The avatar, your picture on a website. Well right here you can say make sure that when I export this as a JPEG it's no greater than whatever that website requires. Not very often I do that, but on occasion I get those sites and it's kind of annoying to figure out what settings are needed to be within their range. Well right there you can. And therefore instead of allowing you to control the quality here, it will figure out the highest quality setting it can use to keep you at this size or less. Over here on the left there's a choice called Color Space. This determines how vivid of colors you can end up with in this photograph. As far as what do I choose here really depends on what I'm gonna use this picture for. If this picture is gonna be uploaded to the Internet, or it's going to be used in any program that's not really designed for professional imaging, instead it's going into a database program, or just some specialized software that isn't expected to do high quality photos, sRGB is the setting I use for all of those uses. And that's because if there's any program that is not very intelligent or sophisticated when it comes to color, and things like database programs usually aren't, then they usually make an assumption about your picture. They assume that it's in sRGB. And if you send it anything from one of these others the colors look different when you get to those programs that aren't really designed for doing great color work. Now that doesn't mean that your picture is gonna look bad. It just means that if you're sending it to a program that's not very sophisticated in its use of color then this is usually gonna make your image look the way it would on your screen. I'd also use this setting for most newspaper printing. And there's a lot of vendors that you use for printing that will ask you to send you their files in sRGB mode, and if so I can choose it here. For me personally I use that if I'm going to the Internet, or if I'm going to deliver a file where I don't know how it's gonna be used and I'm not going for the utmost of quality. Instead I just want it to look like a normal photo and look fine. Then there are some other choices here. Display P3 is what I use if I'm gonna send this to my iPhone or iPad, Apple product. And that will make it so the colors in the image can be as vivid as those particular devices can reproduce, because that's the standard that I believe Apple uses on their iPhone and iPads. Adobe RGB is one of the most common choices here. I would use that choice if you do your own printing, like if you have a color printer on your desk and you want to get the highest quality out of it. Or if you send out your images to be printed and they don't require sRGB. You've asked them and you said, "Hey, can you handle Adobe?" Because Adobe would allow you to have more vivid colors than sRGB. So if the place I send my files to can handle it, and they're fine with it, I've talked to them, I'd rather use that. I'll get more vivid colors possibly. ProPhoto RGB you gotta be careful with. It can create colors that are so vivid it's beyond the range that your eyes can see, or your screen can show, or your printer can reproduce. And so I would only use that if I'm really educated about color. And it's not a bad thing to use, but I would only use it if I'm getting really good at color and I want to get the absolute utmost out of my printer, get to be as vivid as that printer is possibly of creating, and I don't mind spending a little time educating myself about what that really means. So reviewing this menu. I use sRGB for the Internet, or for casual sending of photos to anybody that requested them where I don't know how sophisticated they are with their color usage. I use Adobe RGB if I'm gonna be printing on my own printer, or I'm gonna be sending off to a place that I know is relatively well versed with color, I trust them. And I use ProPhoto usually only for myself, and only if I'm trying to get the utmost out of my printer, and my pictures contain extremely vivid colors. In this case I'm gonna go in here and use Adobe RGB for my time lapse. Let's go down to the next section. Here we're gonna resize our picture. If this checkbox is turned off you're gonna get full size images, whatever size the original was. And for my images they're really high res, and for just a time lapse they're much larger than you need for video. So here I'm gonna choose Resize to Fit, and I'm gonna choose a width and height here. And I'm gonna come in and say I would like this 1920x1080. That's the resolution of HD video, the standard high definition. Over on the right side is a choice called Resolution, and it determines how big the pixels that make up your picture would be if you print them. Now for time lapse that means it's something that would be used for video, that number is unimportant. Literally I could pick any number off the top of my head, type it in, it wouldn't matter. I could type one in there, I could type 30, and there would be no difference when it comes to making video files. This number is used when printing. But let's look at the other settings that are here and determine if we're not doing a time lapse, how do I think about them. Well in here you can choose Long Edge or Short Edge. Sometimes you need to submit an image to maybe a competition, and it will tell you a particular size, and it will just say no more than a certain number of pixels. And if it tells you on the long or short edge you can choose it here. And then if I were to choose let's say Long Edge, now if I have a panorama it will end up being exactly that wide. If I have a square image, it will be that wide times exactly the same height, and so on. Or if somebody says they want a certain number of megapixels in their image you can choose it here, and so on. You want to scale it down or up a bit, you can do so. When it comes to resolution, if you plan on printing your images, most of the time somewhere between 240 and is a great range to use for printing. 240 will give you a slightly smaller file, and so it's a little more manageable. But some people experiment with higher settings and up to about 360 for that. But this number is good for most kinds of printing. We do have a checkbox called Don't Enlarge just in case maybe you have some older photographs that are smaller in size, and you don't want to have them scaled up because any time you scale something up it looks a little softer. And so you might decide you just-- Most of the time I have that turned off because I don't like scaling up images here. So anyway, I got that setup to scale for my HD video. Let me go down to the next one. Here's sharpening. If I turn this off it's not gonna sharpen my picture, and so it will look like it did on the screen in Lightroom. But if I turn this on it can automatically sharpen my images, and I can tell it to either do so for screen viewing, or for printing. And if I'm gonna print it, I just need to tell it is a coated sheet of paper where it's got a gloss finish, or is it uncoated where it's got a matte finish because it uses a different amount of sharpening for each because each one can resolve a different amount of detail. For on screen use it will sharpen it the least because you're gonna see any little hint of sharpening that's in the picture. And for these settings here it will sharpen the image more, with, I believe, the choice called Matte Paper sharpening it the most because that doesn't show as much detail so it kind of compensates for it by sharpening the image more. This is for on screen use, so that's what I'll set it to. And then to the right of it you can tell it how strong a sharpening should it have. For most people, Standard is just fine, but it's really a personal preference. If you find Standard to be too strong, or you notice the sharpening and you find it to be distracting then you might choose that your personal standard is Low. Or if you like your images to really pop you might find Standard to not be enough and you could kick it up to high. In this case I'm actually not gonna sharpen for a time lapse. I might do the sharpening after the fact, after the video is created. All right, now we have metadata. Metadata means text that is about your picture that isn't actually the picture itself. That means like the serial number for your camera, the f-stop you shot with, the date that your image was captured on, and all that. It wants to know simply how much of that should be included in that file. If I come up here you'll find that as you move towards the top here, you include less and less information. If you choose Copyright Only then if you have what's called a metadata template that you apply to your pictures, and that's something we talked about, I believe, in the session about importing, then here it's only gonna include your copyright information. Then if I choose this not only do you have the copyright, within that same metadata template you could have had your contact info, like your web address and your email, and it would include that as well so people would know how to get ahold of you if they knew how to view that info. And then I can go in here and tell it, when I choose All, it's gonna start including things like keywords with my picture. And I can tell it to do things like exclude person keywords because I probably don't want the names of models that I shot, because otherwise other people might know who they are and they might end up contacting them and hiring them for shooting. Or it might be minors and you don't want people to know those names. I can remove location information to keep that private, and all that stuff. If I go all the way here they'd even be able to see my Camera Raw info. And I think that might even be my develop settings in Camera Raw. I wouldn't usually share those with folks. And then all metadata would include absolutely everything that Lightroom has about that file as text included in the exported image. I would probably only use things like that if it's for internal purposes where I might want to view that information, maybe in Adobe Bridge afterwards. But the majority of the time I have this set to Copyright Only or Copyright & Contact Info. It keeps the file size a tiny bit smaller, and it doesn't really share much information. We haven't talked about doing a keyword hierarchy setup. And so this here we'll talk about when we get to that section. All right, if we keep going down we have watermarking. I'll talk about that after we're done making our first preset, then we'll come back and make one that has a watermark. Because for time lapse video I don't want a watermark. Then below that we have post-processing, and that means should it do anything extra after it's done. And if I come here to this popup menu it could show me in my operating system the end result. So if I want to be able to email them quickly it'd be nice if it pops open a window that shows me the files I just exported. You could use that. You could have it open those images in Photoshop. Or if you're gonna use another program, maybe you have a special program for doing time lapse videos, then here you can tell it to open in a different program. Down here you might find some choices but most people won't have any choices here because this is where you've setup actions in Photoshop, and I think you need to save them as what's called a droplet and then put them in a special folder. This would take you to that special folder. You can actually have actions where when you export an image it exports all the files then it opens each file in Photoshop and it applies a multi-step action to it. That's when you're getting pretty fancy. We'll cover this kind of a setting when we get into tips and tricks much later in this class. For now I'm just gonna leave this set to Do nothing. And here where it says Application I believe that would only be active if we chose this. Therefore you'd be able to see what application would open it. So you can see with all these settings, it's a whole bunch of things. You don't want to think about those all the time so what you do is you once go through all the settings that are here and make sure they're all specced out exactly the way you want them. Then on the left side of your screen there's an Add button, and that's where you add the current settings that you've done on the right side of the screen to a preset. So I'm gonna choose Add. What I'm gonna name it is 1920x1080, because that's the width and height that it's gonna export at. I usually like to know what color space it's in, so I know is this image safe to use on the Internet, or is this something that I might not want to. And in this case if I actually look at the settings up here it says it's Adobe RGB. And then I'm gonna say, "to Timelapse Folder." And you can organize these into various folders. Maybe for this one I create a brand new folder and I'm just gonna call this Video, and that's it. So therefore I can have a separate section of presets that are uniquely useful for video-related things. All right, I'm gonna hit Create. And now if you look at the left side of my screen we have created a brand new folder here called Video and contained within it there's our preset. It mentions the width, the height, what color space it's in, which mainly tells me is it safe to use on the Internet, or for general use, that would be the sRGB, or is it gonna give me possibly a little bit more saturated colors. And then I have "to" and what location it's gonna go to. Great, we made a preset. Now let me show you how I ended up creating this big list of presets relatively quickly. Once you have one preset that's based on the general way you're gonna export, let's say I had this preset that I made, then I want to be able to create other versions of it. Well I click on the preset, I look over on the right side, and I think, well what is it that I want to change. The only thing that I want to change right here is the actual width and height of the picture. So I'm gonna make a brand new preset here and I'm gonna end up making it so that it's 1500 pixels by 1500 pixels. And that's the only thing I've changed. Then I'm gonna hit the add button on the left side of my screen, and I'm gonna name it. I'll name it based on the name of the preset it was based on. So I'll just say 1500 sRGB JPEG to Desktop. And I'm not gonna put it in the video folder. I'm gonna put it in the one called User Presets. Great. Now I have another one. Then I would just do another one. Right here I'd type in 900, 900. Hit Add, and I would name it this name right here so you would have that particular preset. I'd come back in. Do 550x550. Do 300x300. Each time saving it and just building up this list. So I have one base preset that I originally created and then I've deviated from it just to get the sizes. And that's what I've done for a lot of these things. I only make one and then quickly create deviations from it. Let's look at a lot of the presets that I have here and give you an idea of why do I have them, when do I use them. Well here is 300 pixel. That is whenever I want to email something, or somebody asks for images, and they don't need to be big at all. It's almost like sending thumbnail versions of your pictures. And so that's the smallest I would usually email to somebody or upload on a website. It's when I don't want them to be as able to see the fine detail in a picture. Maybe I'm gonna give somebody 100 pictures via email and I don't want it to be too big of an email. And if they want a higher resolution version they can come and email me back and ask for it. Then I go a little bit bigger than that. And once I get up to about 900, that's kind of standard size for me for email and for low quality websites. For Facebook though I default to 1200 pixels. It's an image where you click on it in Facebook it gets okay size, you can see enough detail in it. And I actually put a star at the end of the name to remind me that that's my standard for Facebook and most social media sites. That just happens to be what I've chosen. Then here are ones that contain watermarks. If you look at the file names it says w/mark, and LL means lower left, LR is lower right, M is middle, upper left, upper right. I'll show you how to make those watermarks in just a few minutes here. Then we just get larger as we make our way down here. And once we get up here to 1920, those are the same size as on an HDTV. And so if I know something is gonna be presented on a projector or an HDTV, I use that set. Up here, 2560, these are the size of images that I usually give out when I teach. If I ever say you're gonna get the original files. I find that you don't usually need the high res 42 megapixel originals. They'll just clutter up your hard drive and take forever to download. So that's just kind of my standard for that. The number might seem a little odd to you because it's very specific. Why not 2500? Well, if you ever create something called a smart preview, the size of the smart preview is 2560 pixels in the longest dimension. And often times I export when I don't have the hard drive that contains the originals attached. And if those images have smart previews that means I can export them up to this size without having the original drive connected. So that's why I kind of standardized on that size. It's just a convenience for me, and it's nice. Here's Copy of Original to Desktop. If I'm ever gonna teach, or a client needs the original. Let's say it's a layered file or something. That keeps it in the original file format and does not resize it. And then here I have full size TIFF and JPEG files. That's if I need a highest quality reproduction I'm going to send off to a client, or magazine, or have work done on a picture. You get the idea of the range that I have. Well, the thing we haven't talked about is how you make watermarks. Because for some people they want it to, whenever they upload an image to the Internet, somebody couldn't just grab the image and use it on their website without there being some sort of mark to tell you where it came from. Well, if you want to add watermarks that was just a section on the right side of the screen that we skipped over, and it's right here called Watermarking. Now if we come in here there's just a checkbox called Watermark and there's a popup menu here. If you've never made a watermark before this list will be empty though. So you won't find anything there but we can edit our watermarks. Now watermarks aren't used only for exporting. We can use watermarks when we print. We can use them when we do, I think a slideshow. We can use them when we do a book. There's all sorts of areas within Lightroom that will have the option of showing a watermark in your picture and they all look back to the same presets, which we can create here as one location to make them. So let's take a look at how it's done. I'll choose Edit watermarks, and when I do, this comes up. It shows me the picture I currently have selected in Lightroom as an example. And if I have more than one image selected, right here are left and right arrows, and I can go over here and switch between the images. But right now I only have one image selected and therefore these don't really do anything. But if I had like 10 images selected I could switch between them with those arrows. Then we have two kinds of watermarks we can make, and it's determined in the upper right. We can either do it based on text that you type in or we can do it based on a graphic. So let's talk about text. And once we've chosen Text in the upper right, in the lower left we can type in what we'd like to use. And so I can come in here and maybe say Proof Only, which means this isn't a final image. So I want to make sure nobody actually uses it in a magazine or something, because I haven't checked it out for printing. Something like that. You can type in whatever you want down there. Let's look at the settings on the right. Here, Image Options, that's really only used if you use this choice called Graphic. Let's hide that. Come down here to text. Here's where you can choose the typeface that's used for our text. We can also choose if it's bold or italic. We can tell if it's aligned based on where we tell it to be on the image. And what color it is. If it's proof only, maybe I want to make it red. Make it stand out. Then here if we want to have this separate from the background we could have it have a shadow underneath. If I come in here and adjust the shadow right now, being in this corner of the image you're probably not gonna be able to see that shadow. So before we get in there and do that let's scroll down a little bit and just kind of skip over a few settings. Take a look right down here at this choice called Anchor. Anchor means where should it be in the picture. Should it be in the upper left, upper right, or the center? Once I get it on the center you might be able to tell that this is not separating from the image all that well. Let's also get it to be a bit bigger. Here's a setting called Size, and I could bring this up as high as I'd like. There's also an opacity setting, if you want to not see through it or you want to see through it a lot. I'll make it so we can see through it quite a bit. And now if we come up here to Shadow you might notice what I'm doing a little bit more. For our shadow let's make it so the opacity is turned up quite a bit. And then offset means how far away from the original text should it be. And you can see it moving straight down when I move this. There's a really soft shadow. Then we have a setting called Radius, and it determines how soft is the shadow. I usually get it just so it's got a semi-natural feel, not too soft. And then Offset again is how far away from the text it is. I want to get it relatively close in this case. And then when it's moved offset from the text, what direction should it move in? This will just make it move around in a circle around that text. And I can choose exactly what angle I'd like. Or if you don't want a shadow you just have a checkbox to turn your shadow off. So you can see the difference. It can really help to separate your text from the background. Because if you ever use white text and you happen to apply it to a photo that has a white background there, it's not gonna show up at all. But if you have a drop shadow under it, it still will. So you can see our general text options here. Let's go down here to Watermark Effects. Again, here's our Opacity. Do you want to be able to see through that text or not? And here it's a matter of how large should it be. We have a few different choices here. Proportional to the image. If I bring it up, down. I can make it fit or fill. Fill is not that common for me to use unless I'm using a graphic. But I can have it fit the width. Or instead I come down here in proportional and say no, I want to use a slider to do it. We can tell it the anchor. Should it be in the upper left corner, left side, and so on. And when you choose an anchor, here you have an inset, meaning how far from the edge should it be. So I can move it in a little bit, both vertically and horizontally. All right, let's say I have that setup. It's in the upper left corner. Now I want to save this as a preset. Well, you do that in the upper left. See the popup menu? That shows me the preset I started with if I happen to have had one chosen. And here I can say save settings as new preset. I'm gonna call this Proof Only, and I'll call it UL, for upper left. Hit Create. Now I'm gonna create a total of five versions of this and all I'm gonna do is change the anchor setting. I'll get it in the lower left, and I'll just come right back up here and say save as a new preset, and I'll call this Proof Only LL, for lower left. If I want to speed things up I'll actually select the text that's here, copy it, so I can paste it when I save my next one. Hit Create, and now we're gonna go for the lower left. Actually, that's what I called the other one. It should be lower-- No, lower left. Lower right over here. Come over here, save preset, paste, lower right, Create. Get the upper right. New preset, paste. This is upper right. Go for the middle. Save, paste, and I just put M for middle. And now I've just made a set of presets, and it determines where that text will appear. Therefore when I'm exporting I could create an export preset, one for each one of those positions. Now let's talk about doing a graphic instead of a text overlay. In the upper right I switch from Text to the choice called Graphic. And it remembers the last graphic I worked with. So let's come in here and see what we can do with it. First here it says Image Options, and this is where I can choose the graphic I'd like to use. There's just a Choose button. And if I use that I can go, maybe on my desktop here, and see if I have any watermarks. Right there. It's the same watermark we already have chosen, but this is how you get to it. You just hit the Choose button, you navigate. Once you hit Choose you'll see it. This section called Text Options will be all grayed out because that's only if we're working with text. And we have the same watermark effects. So you want the opacity to be turned down or not, and how do I want to size it compared to the image. And then our positioning, and the offset, or inset, I should say, of that. Here I have a graphic setup. Again I go back up here. Save current as new preset, and I would save this in. I might make five versions, one for each corner of the image and one centered, but I already have that. You see up here? Best of Ben Badge, Centered, Lower Left, Lower Right, and so on. But that's how those were created. The problem is this graphic, if you look at it, is round. But I don't see white in the corners. Usually if you just grab a JPEG file you're gonna find that there's white all the way out to the edges if you have a logo. Let me show you how you can remove the background in a graphic and save it in such a way that you can get it over here in Lightroom, use it as a watermark, and you'll have transparency around it instead of having white. For now I'm gonna click on Cancel here, and I'm gonna click on Cancel here to stop our exporting. Just so you know, when you click cancel, I'm not canceling the creation of these presets. I'm canceling exporting of this picture that I happen to have open. I don't even know if you remember the picture. That one. So let's figure out how we can remove the background on a graphic. This could be your signature that you just sign a white sheet of paper, scan it in, or take a photo of it, or it could be your logo. The first thing we need to do is make sure that the graphic we have is truly black, and the background is truly white. So if this is your signature on a white sheet of paper, you took a picture of it, that probably won't be the case. In this case this was created in the computer so I know it's the case. But let me show you what you would do if it wasn't. First thing I would do is come in here to Image Adjustments and I would use Levels. In Levels this slider here forces areas to white. And there's a trick where you can actually see what is white in your picture. If you hold down the option key, that's alt in Windows, when you click on the slider, the upper right slider, you click and hold down, and then you start dragging over and it would actually show you what's white. If you do the same to the other side it would show you what's black. But in order to see that let me actually have something different in this image. Let me just show you a bunch of shades of gray just to demo this. I'll go here to Levels. I'll hold down the option key, and I'll grab the slider. I'll start bringing it over. And right now it's actually not previewing. Ah, we're in CMYK mode. If you're ever in CMYK mode because somebody gave you a file that was prepared for printing, then that feature won't work. So let's change the mode on this image. I'm glad that happened because some people might end up with CMYK files. I just choose Image Mode RGB. Now let's try that. Go to Levels. Upper right slider. Hold option. Now I'm seeing it. What happens is when you have the option key held down it changes your image to generally solid white and solid black. And if you're moving in the right side it's showing you everything that's solid white in your picture. Anything else on your screen that's not displayed as white, isn't white. It will make everything else in your image look black. So I can move this in until I notice the area around my logo, or my signature, turns all white. You can do the same thing in the opposite side. If you hold down the option key and click, pull it over, it's showing you now only what's solid black. Anything on your screen that doesn't look solid black is not. It's some other shade of gray or color. And so you can bring that in, and if you had a signature or a logo you'd bring it in until most of your logo or signature shows up as black. That would tell you how far in you need to move these two particular sliders to end up with solid black and solid white. For me I'm gonna revert this image. I'm gonna choose an undo a few times. And this image was created in the computer so there's no need to make it solid black and solid white. It already is. I just wanted to show you that in case you scanned a picture. All right, now I want to save this image, get it to be used from Photoshop to Lightroom. Let's figure out how to get rid of this background. If you know the background of the image is white, and you know what you want to keep is black, here's how you can do it. You need to go to the Channels panel in Photoshop. If you don't have the Channels panel visible on your screen already you can go to the Window menu to find it. It's right here. That will make it visible. You only need to be in there for a moment. What you're gonna do is move your mouse onto the top most picture that shows up in the Channels panel. You're gonna hold down the command key, that's control on Windows, and you're gonna click within it. Then that will give you a selection of everything that's white in your picture. We actually want the opposite of that so go to the Select menu and choose Inverse. Inverse means give me the opposite. Now you will have your signature or logo selected. And now you're done using the Channels panel. Now what I usually do at this stage is a lot of people think about as if you want to keep the layer you're working on and just remove that background. What I do instead is I create a brand new layer. I go to the bottom of my Layers panel. I click on this half black and half white circle, that's where you usually create an adjustment layer, and I choose Solid Color. And that means fill in the selection that I have with a solid color. When I use that I get a color picker, and at this stage I can choose any color I like for the color of my graphic and it will fill in the image. The other thing that this does is it makes sure that we don't have any intermediate colors clinging to the edge of our logo. If I take our logo file and I just delete the background instead of doing what I've done here, usually you get some hint of the old background clinging to the edge, in what's known a anti-aliasing. It just means where it fades out at the edge. So I get the color that I want. And then I simply throw away the original layer. There, got it. Now at this stage what I usually want to do is get any empty space out of the document. To get empty space out, like up here where we just have an empty spot, over here, same with at the bottom, so we can get this to be as small as possible. I can go to the Image menu and there's a choice called Trim. Just use the default settings and that's gonna snug in the edges of your pictures until it touches the graphic without actually cutting anything off. The final step is to save it. So I'm gonna go down here to File Export and there's a bunch of choices you can use in here. I'm used to using Save for Web because I'm kind of old school. That's an older command you're welcome to use as well. And when this comes up, all you need to do is change this menu right here to PNG-24. PNG-24, if you've ever heard of a PNG file, that's what we're creating. And you just need to have a little checkbox called Transparency turned on. If you want to scale down your logo you're welcome to do so here. But it all depends how big you're gonna use it in Lightroom. If you don't want it to ever be jagged you might want to keep it full size. I'm gonna hit the Save button. And I'm gonna call this BW, because that's what the letters are. I actually have a shortcut that automatically expands that. But I'm gonna call that that, and then RED, because that's the color. And I'm gonna put that on my desktop. All right, let's go try to use that within Lightroom now that we've gotten rid of the background. I can close the file. I'm not gonna save over the original. And we'll get right over to Lightroom. All right, how did we end up creating an export preset? Well, we went to the File menu. That's where we found Export. Then before starting to mess with any of the settings on the right side, I look on the left and I said, well, what preset do I want to base it on. Maybe in this particular case I want to create something that is 1200 pixels. That's my standard for Facebook and things. So I click on that. That loads all the settings on the right side for that particular preset. And I just say I want to add a watermark. Come over here and let's edit our watermarks. And let's use our graphic. So in the upper right we choose Graphic. It asks me for the file. And I think I put it on my desktop. It's right there. Hit Choose. And I might have that inset a little bit from the side, from the bottom. And I might lower the opacity a little bit. And then in the upper left I'm gonna tell it to Save Current Settings as New Preset. And I'll call this-- I think it was 1200 pixels wide. So 1200-- Actually this is just the watermark preset, not the actual export one. I'll call it BW, although that's gonna auto expand when I hit the space bar. Oh, it usually would. There we go. RED, and that's the lower left. Create. Now I can hit Done because we have that watermark created, and right here it's chosen it because that's where I created it. I'm gonna then save that as part of a preset down here. I hit Add, and this is where I'm gonna name it 1200 sRGB w/mark-- Call it BW mark-- to Desktop. And I can put it in User Presets, or maybe I could create a new folder just called Watermarked. Therefore I don't find it cluttering up the rest of the list, and it's a little easier to target. Okay, there it is. I've got a new folder. It's got my new preset in there. And by the way, if you have some other presets, like here's one with watermarks, I want to organize them that way. I can just drag them up here. And any of them that say "w/mark" I might want to put in this section. And I believe it ends up sorting these alphabetically, so it doesn't matter where you let go within this list. It's going to do them alphabetically anyway. And here I have video related ones. Maybe all these ones down here that are 1920 are for those, or in this case these are for projecting so they're not really specific to video. Otherwise I might move them up here. But I might choose also to further organize this. When you hit the Add button in the lower left right here you can tell it what folder, and if you choose New Folder you don't have to be making a new preset. You can just come in here and make folders. I'm gonna just call this Small and I'm gonna put a bunch of presets for things that are small exports. I'll do New, and I'll say Medium. And then I'll say one more, Large. So we can organize our presets. And I was just using this to make folders, not actually making presets, so I can hit Cancel here. And now we can drag our other presets here. I'm gonna drag the small ones under Small. Get this all organized. I'm gonna put the 1200s in the Medium. Same with the 15s, and the 1920s. And then I'm gonna take these and those will be for Large. I wish I could hold shift and grab more, but I can't. Instead I'll just drag them up one at a time. It only takes a few minutes, but if you do, the next time you go to your Export menu, instead of seeing a long list that you have to mentally go through each time, you're gonna see these sub-sections, and it will probably be much easier to find. Now if you end up creating some folders and you don't really want them, maybe I don't want the Video folder anymore, there is a choice called Remove right down here and that would throw that away. You will find that some of these folders you can't throw away, like the one that Lightroom adds automatically, or if you have one down here called User Presets it won't let you remove it. I think there might be a trick to get rid of that one. But in general, here's what we have. I'm gonna then hit Cancel because what we're canceling here is exporting this picture. We're not canceling making of these presets. And now let's take a look at our File Export menu. Check it out. We now have... Oh, I thought it would have... Maybe it did actually cancel my... Let's go back to Export. No. Large, Medium, Small, and User Presets is empty. My assumption at this point, because I've done this before and it showed up just fine-- Oh, there. It took it a moment to update. It has to figure out that I've done that, because it'd thrown them all together into User Presets. What happens when you do that is it's actually creating folders in your hard drive, and Lightroom might not instantaneously look at that folder to see what it has. It might just take it a moment to refresh. But now if I look at this here we have Large settings, Medium ones, Small, Video related, and Watermarked. And to me it's much easier to find a preset I might want to utilize when they are setup into subfolders. Now one question I'd have at this point is all right, I did all that work, I made all of those, but I also have a copy of Lightroom at home, and I did this at the office. Is there anyway I can somehow get those to show up at home? Well, there's a folder for Lightroom that contains your preferences, all your presets and things, and if you get to that folder and you copy all of these presets, you bring them home on a disk or you email them to yourself. When you get home, if you go to the exact same folder and you drag them there, the next time you go to this menu you'd find them on that other copy of Photoshop. So here's how you can find the folder. I'm gonna again go to the File menu and choose Export. That's where we made those presets. And here's kind of a weird tip. If you go down to this area called Post-Processing, there's a choice within this menu called Go to Export Actions Folder Now. We're not gonna talk about export actions until way late in the class, like near the end when we do tips and tricks, and advanced stuff. But if you simply choose that choice-- Remember it's under Post-Processing. Go to Export Actions Folder Now-- it brings you to that folder but it also is bringing you the exact same area where right here we find our export presets. And so that folder is the folder I would want to copy, and email to myself at home, or copy onto a disk. And I would want to go into the other copy of Lightroom, go to that exact same menu I showed you, that will make this folder visible and you'd be able to move them over here. Also here is where I believe I'd be able to take the User Presets and delete them. I'm gonna move that to the trash. It wouldn't usually allow me to delete User Presets, but that might be a trick that will make it work. So when exporting images. We got an image. Lightroom has the original file stored wherever you told it to. You can find that in the folder list. This I'm viewing in a different way, as if I'm in a search or a collection. And if I right click on the image I can say Go to Folder and Library. So here's the folder on my hard drive, from 2011, Africa folder. That folder though contains only the original picture. Any change we've made in Lightroom, like going to the Develop module and processing the picture, it's only saved as text, and that's in our Lightroom catalog file. And that means if I wanted to give that picture to somebody else I can't just give them the original. It wouldn't look like that. So I need to go up to the File menu and export this picture. And I usually go here to Export with Preset. And this is setup for all the common things that I need to use pictures for in general. And so I simply choose from one of these. And if I want to get one this size with a watermark in the lower left, I just choose this. This file already exists because we've exported it before, so it warns me. And I'll just tell it to use a unique name so there will be two copies of it there. If I just chose a different picture and do that it wouldn't have warned me because I've never exported this picture before. But that's all it takes. Then if I go and look on my desktop I can see the pictures right there. And it's very easy to get those images ready to email off to someone else. If I ever need something that doesn't conform to one of these presets, then I choose Export. That's where I made the presets. And what I do is I don't mess with all the stuff on the right. Instead I choose the preset that's closest to what I want. And then I just decide, how did I need to deviate from it? Maybe it needed a watermark. Maybe it needed an odd size. Whatever it is, and I type in what I need. If I hit the Export button down here it's gonna export just the pictures that are currently selected, using these settings. And so I can do it as kind of a one off custom setting for an export. One other choice we have under the File menu related to exporting is Export with Previous. That means just use the exact same settings I used last time I exported. So if you're getting a bunch of images ready for a particular presentation, they all need to be the same size, you've already exported one. There's no need to come to this menu and kind of hunt and peck looking for the preset you want. If the last one used is the preset you need, just choose Export with Previous. There is one final choice in here related to exporting. That's Export as Catalog, and that has nothing to do with preparing final images to give to someone else. That has to do with working with catalogs, and we'll cover that in a different lesson. So keep in mind we're keeping our original pictures pristine, originals untouched, Lightroom catalog file is keeping track of our changes, and we export when we need to give to someone else. Once I've emailed or given them to someone else I just throw away those images that were exported because I can always export again if they called me up and said they needed another copy. Another thing I need to do when it comes to finalizing my pictures would be printing. And so let's take a look at what's involved to print from Lightroom. When printing from Lightroom you can start the same way you would in other programs with a keyboard shortcut for printing. And that's pretty standard. It's command-P on a Macintosh, control-P on Windows. And if I were to type that it would do the same thing as going to the upper right of my screen and clicking on the word Print, which should send me to the print module within Lightroom. This is where I setup what's needed for printing. And know that when we're done, we're gonna usually, just like when we export, we're gonna use a preset. And so when I go through all the settings for printing know that it's rare for me to actually need to go and look at all of them. Just like when exporting a picture I usually just quickly choose a preset and I'm done with it. But in order to have that convenience we need to be able to know the settings that are involved and create the presets in the first place. But once you get those presets created, the process of printing from Lightroom is extremely simple. I mean, it can take me literally in three seconds I can start printing a picture, whereas in other programs you have to think about all the settings because you're not usually using a preset setup. So first off on the left side of my screen, over here, we have something called the Template Browser. And in the end, once we've done looking at all the individual settings needed for printing, this is where we're gonna save those settings so we can get to them later. And so usually I would click on the choice that is closest to what I want. In this case I mainly print on two different sizes of paper. I print on 8.5x11, and I print on 13x19. Those are the two sheets that I keep in stock where I live. And the vast majority of the time I print borderless on luster paper. Premium luster, you might call it. And so here I just have presets for those two particular purposes. Let's look at what's involved in creating those presets, just keeping in mind that when we're done we don't have to think about all the settings. We only have to remember where the preset was saved, and we have to make sure it's got a good name. So, on the right side of my screen are all the settings. But before you start messing with those it's really best if Lightroom knows what printer you would like to print to, and it knows what ink set. Like if you're gonna use glossy paper, that kind of thing, and the size of the paper. So if I go to the left side of my screen, down here are two buttons. And if I click on Print Settings this is part of my operating system. And so if you use Windows this will look different, but it will be the standard window you see when you print from any program. And right at the top, at least on a Mac, this is where I can choose which printer I would like to use. I'm gonna set this up for my EPSON P600, which is my standard printer that I print to. That's a printer that can do up to 13x19 inches. And you can also go in here and choose various options for paper handling and other things. But that's where I'm choosing which paper-- Not paper, printer I would like to use. Hit Save. Then also on the left side of my screen is a button called Page Setup, which brings me to another portion of my operating system. And this is where I'm gonna end up picking the paper size that I'm printing to. There it wants to know what printer is it for, and right here, the paper size. So here, US Letter Borderless. That should work out fine. And that's what we can setup. Click OK. Also when you're in Print Settings you can define other settings related to color handling. Usually end up going in there to choose if you want to use matte ink or glossy. Now on the right side of my image, now that it knows the printer we're printing to, and the size of paper, we can start experimenting. Up here there are three settings for the general layout that you'd like to use. The top-most choice is going to print just a blatant image like this, or a set of thumbnails on a sheet. The other two choices is where you're gonna literally be able to choose a picture package, which is where you can say I want five 5x7s, one 8x10, one wallet size, whatever, and it will figure out how many pages of the size paper you need to fit that in, and all that kind of stuff. But let's start with the top setting and let's work our way through what we can change for our layout. Here we have Image Settings, and here is where we can zoom the image to fill or fit. Well, if you've cropped your image to particular proportions, like a square, for instance, and you want to keep that, then if we Rotate to Fit and we just leave this the way it is, what it's going to do is make sure it keeps the proportions of the image. If it's more important, though, that it fills the sheet of paper you're printing on then you might choose Zoom to Fill. You don't have all that much control over it, though. We could drag it around a little bit if it needed to be positioned differently. But if you wanted to precisely crop this image I would have used the crop tool ahead of time. I would have typed in the exact proportions of the sheet of paper I wanted to print to and I would have precisely cropped this. And therefore I wouldn't need to use Zoom to Fill. In this case, though, we get these white bars if we didn't zoom to fill, and if it does zoom it up it's gonna scale this image up. Then I can always click within the image and just drag to define what portion of the image I'd like to include. We'll talk about this setting in just a moment. Down here we have a choice called Stroke Border. Not all that useful when your picture is going all the way out to the edge. But if you ever have it where it's not going all the way out to the edge and you have a picture that might have some white on the edge of it, like it just fades off, maybe there's a sky and it blows out to solid white, if you want to be able to tell where that picture ends and the blank paper begins, you can add a stroke border. Then you can specify how wide it is here. I'm sure I can also bring this up if I want a simple border around my picture that is of a particular color. On the right side there's a little rectangle that if you click on you get a color picker, and you can choose the color that you would like in here. We can come in here. And we choose more saturated colors. You just need to bring this thing up and then you can get to any color you'd like. I don't like, usually, putting what I would consider distracting colors on the edge. I'm gonna turn that off. Below that we have Layout. And here's where I can determine if it should go all the way out to the edge of the sheet of paper, or if we should have a gap. Here maybe on the left edge, or maybe at the bottom. Maybe I'm gonna sign the prints and I just want some extra space down there. Whatever it happens to be you can specify it here. You'll find it rotating the picture on occasion. And if you see that and you don't want it to happen, that was one of the settings up above, Rotate to Fit. If that's turned off it will keep it in the original orientation. Anyway, there's your margins. But in my case I want to print all the way to the edges. Then here this determines how many images are gonna be on that sheet of paper. If this is set to one and one, it's gonna be a single picture. But if you start bringing this up you would get a grid of thumbnails of smaller versions of the image. Since right now I only have one picture selected, it's only gonna show one image. But if I had like 30 images selected I'd see all 30 images sitting here on the page. If we're setting up just a template right now and I just happen to have one picture, there is a convenient setting, and that is up here there was a choice called Repeat One Photo per Page. And if I turn that on it will use the exact same picture as kind of a fill in for this. Sometimes that's useful when you're working down here and figuring out what kind of grid size you'd want, and that type of thing. Then if you want this where the pictures are not touching each other, we have cell spacing. And if I bring it up it will add white space, in this case vertically. So you've got a little vertical gap there. Or horizontally between the images. And if I use that together with the margins where I do it on the paper as a whole I could spent some time and get this setup just right because maybe I want to be able to cut these with a ruler and an X-ACTO knife, or a pair of scissors, and I might want to set this up a particular way. Remember this is something we can save as a template. I don't expect you to come in here and tweak this every time you want to print. Instead you try to set this up the way you really like, and then on the left side of our screen in the Template Browser there's just a plus sign right there. And so right now I could click that, and I could say this will be a 6 * 8 images on, I think it was an 8.5x11. And if I put it in Ben's Templates, now I hit Create, and I only need to remember how to set this up once. And if I want to switch now between printing a borderless, big picture just on a sheet of paper to printing a large number of images on a sheet, all it takes is a single click. I mention that primarily because if you're just staring at all of these settings you're thinking, "This is overwhelming to print." Well, no it's not. It's overwhelming to create a template. And that's not overwhelming because it's gonna save you so much time later. Remember we have a setting turned on up here called Zoom to Fill. So this is filling in whatever area we've defined. And if I turn that off, you'll see the full image. The other thing that might be useful when you're messing with all these settings is it hard to determine why is it making these huge gaps here. Well there's a choice down below called Guides. And if I show guides it will tell me where exactly the margins, it will show a guide introducing exactly how far over it is forcing things. And it makes it a little bit easier to figure out what you might need to change. In this case I can see that my layout is making only three images vertically, so I look for the setting. Right there it says rows three. I need to get that up higher to make it look like the images would fit the page better. So you get the idea of we got our layout there, we got our guides below. The guides can sometimes make it look a little busy so after I've got it setup I usually turn them off to get the overall look of our picture. Below that we have Page. And here, if we want to control what color goes in between all those images, wherever it's not a picture, here we can do the background color of the page. On the right side there's a little square I can click on. Maybe I want it to be black in between there, or a shade of gray, whatever it happens to be. I'll leave it at white, though. Here you have Identity Plate. Identity Plate is something we talked about early on, and that was where we could customize Lightroom so that this area in the upper left can have our name or our logo in there. Well we can use that kind of information also here. If I turn on this setting called Identity Plate, I can now see that overlaid right in the center of my printout. And I might not want to put it right in the center. I can click on it and drag it. Maybe I want to put it down here at the bottom so I have the name of my company down there. So if anybody, I send this to them as a print, then they'll know how to contact me because they remember who it came from. And that's one reason why I setup various identity plates. One of my identity plates is usually just my signature, because then I can setup a print, maybe it's a horizontal layout for my paper. My picture is above and it's got white space, the same amount of white space you would use when you mat a photograph with a cut out mat. So it just visually looks like that. And at the bottom centered it has my name signed. And I only have to create that once here with all these settings that are available, and then I save it as a template, and it's very easy to reproduce it in the future. So anyway, there's our identity plate we can add. You can click right here and switch between various identity plates. So if you set them up for other purposes you can do that. And there is a choice to override the color. If, up here, I usually use red and white, that white is not gonna show up very well on a white sheet of paper. So I might want to override my color and on the right make it so it's black, which is what we have now. I can also lower the opacity or scale my identity plate up or down to make it fit where I'd like. But I can also move my mouse here and just move it around. Render behind image would literally make it behind. So I could make it only fill the white space that are in between the images. There are some weird things you can do with that, but we'll do that in tips and tricks instead of here in a general description. And we can also render on every image, and that, instead of putting it once on the sheet of paper, it's gonna put it on top of every single picture. And that's where we could have a copyright notice, the word proof only, whatever you'd like there. But that's one choice. I don't know if you can see it but I can see it right in the center of the pictures. There we go. So that's Identity Plate. We also have watermarking. Remember how when we exported images we created a watermarking template. Well right here we can use it, and if we do... I'll end up doing one of these in the lower left. I could use the template. It's gonna be hard to see it here though because the pictures are so small. If I used this on a large image, like filling the page, it would be easier to see. Because right now there is a watermark in the lower left of every one of those pictures. Then here we have some page options. This is where we can get it to add some extra information. If we end up with a lot of images, where let's see we have 500 images we're gonna do this with, this would probably be more than one page long, so here we can put a page number. If you look in the lower right you might be able to notice a little number down there. You can also do page info, and what that will do is tell you the printing settings that were used. If I turn off my identity plate you might be able to see that a little better. It will tell you the sharpening used, the profile that was used when printing, and what printer it was on. I might do that if I have a single image on the page, and I just finished this image, it's perfect, I'm ready to sell the image, and now I just want to make it so if I ever come back and try to reprint the image, I remember what paper I had in the printer, what printer it was printed with. So I can put that on the edge. Another thing in this section is Crop Marks. It's gonna put little bitty marks near the corners of each image so if you wanted to be able to cut those out with a ruler it could be easier, especially if this image had white on the edge where it's hard to visually see where it ends. Then there's also a choice called Photo Info. In there you can actually choose what information would appear below each picture. So if you want it to be the file name, therefore when you gave this print to someone else they can specify which image they liked, they can get it. Or I can do exposure, or a whole bunch of other choices. And what size the text is is at the bottom. You can see under the Page menu there's a whole bunch of settings. Now I'm gonna go back to a simpler version of this image because I just don't want to be looking at so many small versions of the picture. And let's next go down here to print job. There's two things we can do here. The first is if we're gonna print on our own printer that's sitting in our office, we can specify the settings used when printing. If on the other hand we send out our images and we don't do our own printing, instead we have a company that does it for us, well we can tell it to instead save to a JPEG file. Therefore we prep a file of the right size and settings. Then we can email it off or get on a website and order a print to do that. Let's start with the JPEG File settings, because you'll see it does switch out some of the settings that are here. And let's take a look at a few of the choices. Here we can choose the resolution of the file. We can choose any kind of sharpening that should be applied to it. These are the same settings you find when you're exporting an image. The quality of the JPEG. And if we need any custom dimensions. Because the way we specified the size of the sheet of paper was over on the left side of our screen, down here in Page Setup, and you might not have something setup in your computer that has a particular size of sheet that some company offers you to print to. So right here you can tell it to use a custom size and type in what you'd like. That custom size will only be there if you're printing to a JPEG file. If you're printing to a printer, the settings that are in here will be a little bit different. Here's a choice called Print Resolution. You can force Lightroom to change the resolution and print at a specific resolution. If you turn that off, Lightroom will decide what resolution is used. So if you're into printing and you know you like your prints at a particular resolution you can control it here. 240 or 360 is usually good for most kind of printing. 16-Bit Output is going to make it take longer to print by sending a lot more information to the printer. I would mainly use that if you've printed an image before and you found that any smooth gradients, like a sky where it goes from deep blue to a lighter blue, if it ever looks stair stepped where it doesn't look smooth, then print it again and turn on this checkbox so it ends up sending a lot more information to the printer and it can produce a smoother looking end result. But it will print a lot slower. Below that we have the settings for printing. And right here is the kind of paper we're gonna use. This is known as the color profile for your paper. And you notice that here there's not very many choices in this list. And I love that because in most other programs, if you print and it ever has a choice for the profile for your paper, it's a list of every profile that's installed on your computer, and sometimes that's a really long list. But I primarily print to two kinds of paper, and so I usually only need about two choices that are here. If you choose the choice called Other it will show you the list that you would usually see in many other programs when printing, and I can come in here and turn off the checkboxes on the ones I don't use. And here I have my P600 ones. Maybe I end up using these two particular kinds of paper, and I don't usually need that. So you can control what appears in that particular list. Click OK and now if I go back to this list you'll see I've changed what is in there. So there's only certain brands of paper you buy. Go look in your closet. See how many different brands and versions of paper you have. Go over here and choose Other and make it so the only papers that show up on the list are the ones that you actually print to. Therefore you don't have to look through a cluttered list to choose your paper profile. If you don't have a profile for you paper, usually the paper manufacturer, you can get it on their website. That is a crucial piece you need to print accurately. Below that you have an Intent. In here you have Perceptual or you have Relative. And if you hover over these it will give you a better idea for what they mean. But most of the time, Perceptual is what I end up using when printing. But if you hover over each one it will give you a little idea. It has to do with if you have any colors that are beyond the range that are printable, how does it deal with those, how does it get it within the range that are printable. But Perceptual is what I use for the majority of images. Finally below that we have this area called Print Adjustment. And if you have an accurate profile for your paper, and your screen has been adjusted properly, then you shouldn't need to use these settings. But if you find that every single time you print your prints look too dark, and they're just lacking contrast. Well, it would be best for you to calibrate your screen and make sure the profile for your paper is appropriate and that should fix the problem. But if you just can't do that. You're at work. It's an employer. You don't have control over that kind of thing. Then you could come down here and choose Print Adjustment. When you move these sliders you'll find it does not change the look of the picture at all. But it will change the output that is sent to the printer. So if I bring the brightness up, it will print a brighter image. Same with if I bring contrast up. But you won't visually see it here. But that's one way you can compensate for an inaccurate profile, or for a screen that's not calibrated, is you can tweak the output sent to the printer. But hopefully you won't need to do that because if you have an idealized setup you wouldn't need it. Then finally down here we have the Print button. And that's actually gonna make the print. So we've looked at all the settings that are found in here, but so far when we did we were using this top setting. That's where we do a single image, or a contact sheet, where it's thumbnails, a whole bunch of thumbnails on one sheet of paper. And know that when I did the contact sheet we happened to have seen a single picture, but if I had more than one image selected, like if I go down here to the bottom of my screen to what's known as the film strip, and I selected a bunch of images down there... Let me get a whole bunch here. Then if I were to come in and do the contact sheet, as long as I don't have this repeat one per page, then I could have come in and on my layout, when I told it to do a lot of rows and a lot of columns, I could have had all sorts of different pictures in there. Just don't use Zoom to Fill when you have that if you don't want it to crop your pictures. All right, now let's look at the other two choices that are here. If we were to choose picture package then what we need to do is come down to this area called Cells, because that is only available when we switch to the choice called Picture Package. I'm gonna click on this button called Clear Layout. And let's say I have an image, and a client wants me to make a bunch of prints. They want, I don't know, let's say they want three 5x7s. So I just clicked on this little arrow on the right next to one of these settings if I didn't see the size I wanted. I set it to 5x7, and now I'm gonna click it three times. It's creating however many sheets of paper would be needed to make an image of that size. In this particular case I might want the image to go all the way out to the edges so I might choose Zoom to Fill so it actually looks like 5x7s. Then if I go back down to Cells let's say they also wanted a few really small images. Maybe they wanted four of them. So I click this button four times and it adds four more of that particular size. If I don't find the size that I need here and it's not even in the menu that's here there's a choice called Edit. Maybe I end up doing a lot of images that are 3x3 inches, and it just wasn't in the list. Well, I can type it in here, hit Add, and now it will be in that button. So if I need six 3x3 images I hit this button a total of six times. So now I can set that up so if you're somebody like you shoot high school sporting teams and they're able to order a package of images, this is where I can set those up. If you have standard packages where for a particular price they always get this particular combination of prints, then I would go on the left side of my screen and on the Template Browser I hit the plus sign and I would name this, maybe Standard Package, if that's the standard one that I offer. Hit Create. Oh, looks like I already have one of that name, so I might call it Standard Package large. All right. And I can do that. Therefore I don't have to remember and setup these buttons again. Instead it will have this layout every time that I come to it. Now here it says for that particular package that I've defined it's going to take three pages. In the lower right corner it says page 1 - 3, showing me all three pages, of 60. Why does it say 60? Well that's because if I were to hit the Print button right now I would be printing all of the images that I currently have selected. Either I selected them when I was in the library module before I came to print, or I selected them down here after getting to the library module. So if I switch this so I only have three images selected then that number will go down. So if we're doing three page total for each image it's a total of nine. But all I need to do now to print is hit that Print button. Then there's one final thing to think about when it comes to printing, and that is at the top edge there's a choice right here called Create Saved Print. Let's say I want to make it very easy to print these images, and let's say that maybe I do a standard print. I sell it on my website. If somebody orders that I want it to be very quick and easy for me to get to the Print module, to remember the image that I sell, and the layout. Well, if I do Create Saved Print, I can give this a name. I'm gonna call this Standard Print Package. I can put it inside of a different collection if I want to. I'm gonna put it just on the base. And if I want to include the photos that I currently have selected I can do so. There are a few other options in here. I'm not gonna mess with those right now. I'm just gonna hit Create. So now let's see what we did here in the Print module. I'm gonna go back to the Library module, where I see my pictures, and look on the left side of my screen. Here's what I have my Catalog, my Folders, and if I continue down we have this thing called Collections. And if I collapse down most of my collections right there is what I just made. It says Standard Print Package. Well these is where it saves the pictures that I had as well as the print settings that I had specified for them. So I could set this up so if I offer maybe a total of five images on my website that you could order with this particular package, and somebody placed an order. Well, I can have the five images right here. Let's put a few additional images in there and see how it would work. I can grab any image that I want now and drag it on top of there. You'll see the number next to it increase, and I can come up here and add as many pictures as I want. If I click on this particular collection you'll see all the images that I've added. These might be all the pictures that I offer in that package on my website. Then if I want to print them, if you hover over this particular collection, on the right side you see a little arrow. If I click that arrow it just sent me to the Print module, and one click of the Print button would suddenly print all those images for me. In this case, printing just three of them. If I wanted to print all of them down here in the film strip I can decide which of them do I want to print, and I can always select all of them. A single click of the Print button and we now would have packages for each one of those images. Most of the time though I do that not when I'm using packages. It's when I have a standard print size. I sell 13x19 prints of these particular set of images on my website, somebody just wanted to order a print, and I want to get to it quickly. Well, I would have one of these collections setup for 13x19 prints on website. I would click on it. It would show me all the prints I offer. I click on the one print that the client wanted to order a copy of. And then when I come down here to this, if I click the arrow, it sends me directly into printing, and I have one button, which is just Print to get that print made. It can dramatically speed up the way you work with printing. It takes a little bit of time ahead of time though to setup your templates. I think it's really worth it. All right, if you think about what we've done, we're done with the first week. But this is only the first week out of four. So now we've got a good foundation to build on. We know how to import our images, we know how to adjust them, and we know how to get them out of Lightroom. And now we can spend our time thinking about the really interesting features that are built in to Lightroom. So next week we're gonna talk about organizing and adjusting our images in depth. So instead of limiting ourselves to the basic adjustments and basic settings for organizing, we're gonna get much deeper into it. But before we leave, let's talk about where you can ask questions about the class and get feedback from other people that are watching. Well we have a private Facebook group that I'd love for you to join, and when you get there, ask questions related to this particular episode. If you've purchased the class you're gonna be able to play back and pause this video any time you like, and you get a lot of extra features. You're gonna end up getting Develop presets, Keyword sets, a workbook for every day, and you also get homework that tries to guide you through exactly what you should do to really utilize what we talked about at the deepest level with your own work. If you want to find me on various social media, here's where you need to go. And this has been Lightroom Classic: The Complete Guide.