Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Introduction: Making Books and Magazines

Let's talk about the idea of making printed material. I'm the first type of printed material that I really love to make is a book. And so we're gonna talk about making a book because there's actually a book module right here inside of light room, right at the top. The book module is absolutely fantastic. So the first thing that we need to do when we're making a book is collect a bunch of images, and that's what collections air good for making a set of images from anywhere. Noticed that all of these images that I've collected for this art book that I'm making are different. They're from different jobs. They're from different time periods, different places. And so all I did is just go through my collection of images, and any time I saw an image that I liked, I either condone drag it into this collection, or if you turn to any collection and right, click it and set it as a target collection. It will have a little plus sign next to it, and that little plus sign means that if I ever click t...

his little dot up here and it turns grey, it's going to be added to the target collection to that one specific collection. Or I can click on an image and just hit the Beaky, and it will add it to that collection. By the way, if you're in the target collection and you click on an image that you don't want in the target collection anymore and he hit the Beaky, it will remove it. Which is why I'm not actually hitting the Beaky right now because I don't want to remove this image from the target collection. So the B Kiefer boy, I want this in the target collection is the Oh, here. I can do it right here because I've got two images. Somehow I collected two of the same. So I'm gonna click on this image and say, Boy, I don't need two of those. So I hit the Beaky and now that one got removed from the target collection. It's still wherever it was inside of my files, but on I've got all of my images here. Okay. Oh, there's another one. So I don't know. That's that's two versions of it, but actually, I'll get rid of Well, keep both. Um um So I'm scanning through and looking to see if there's any additional images. Notice that I have my logo inside of this collection. And the reason I have my logo inside the collection is because I want to be able to use it on the spine of the book or inside on one of the pages of the book. So you got to include anything that you want to use in this book inside of the collection. Now you can keep adding to it later. Even after you've made a book, you can add more images to the collection and then go in and place those in your book so you can do it later too. So we've got all of the images that we want inside of our collection. And so now we're going to make a book. So we simply click on the book module, and it's gonna take a little while to get over there because it has toe do a couple things. All right, we're ready. Uh, that's actually pretty fast. So, um, sometimes it'll take a little while because has to build him and find him and pull him. But there's the book now. The question is what kind of book. Do we want to make the kind of book you want to make is going to to be be dependent on what you're trying to do with the photos what you're trying to do with the book itself, Um, and also how much money you're willing to pay to make the book if you want to pay nothing. If you want to have no expenses whatsoever in making this book, the best way to do it would be to click on the so the up here in the top right hand corner, thes air, all the settings for your book and you click on here and we can make either a PdF book or a J peg. So if you make a PdF of it, it's going to make a Pdf book. And then you can just send the book to whoever you want. And you don't have to worry about paying any printing costs whatsoever. So that's the cheapest way to make the book. If you found a place where you could make a book Super super cheap and you like the printing quality on it, then maybe you want to make a J peg off all of the pages and then take those J pegs and put them into whatever book software online bookmaking place you want and then build the book from there. But be aware that you're going to be using whatever size a book that the light room book module makes. That's the size that you're gonna be stuck with. You can't actually change the size of the pages other than using their specific sizes. And all of those sizes are based on the blurb printing press. And so blurb is the one that makes three different types of books or magazines that you can make through the light room portal. You can actually make mawr, um, options inside of blurb itself. If you go to blurb export J pegs of your images and then go up to blurb, you could make a whole bunch more or download their bookmaking software, and you can make a whole bunch of different types of things. But from light room directly, we can work on three different types of photo book, a magazine or a trade book. I'm gonna show you all three types. So this is a photo book here and the photo book has really high quality printed paper in it, and this one particularly is a lay flat book. So Lay Flat book has no gutter, so other books have like a gutter and it kind of the pages go into the gutter. But this is a lay flat book, so it actually lays really flat. It's perfect for doing a wedding. It's a fantastic way to show off your images for a wedding. The client will love him, and it's inexpensive in comparison to an album. So album companies make books just like this, but with really high quality photo paper and leather buying bound albums. And there are about £ of peace. This is a really great option to have an inexpensive wedding book for somebody rather than an album. So that is a photo book. The next one that we're gonna look at is a magazine, and it's this. So this is a magazine. This is actually the highest quality magazine that they have two different types of magazines of the day. But this one was printed directly from light room, and it is a super high quality magazine. I love the way it looks. I actually used it to make kind of like a photo book, plus some text. So I've got some of my writing in there as well. So it's just kind of a fun project where I put some of my writing in there and my images, and it's really easy to make its It's Ah, it's really inexpensive. So this is a much so these books. The photo books can run you $80 to $150 to $200 depending on how big a book and how many pages. And this, um, is really great quality imagery, great quality printing, and it's less expensive. So maybe you'd spend with the same number of pages you might spend $50 on something like this, or sometimes you can get a magazine is as little as about 5 to $10 so you can really get a fairly inexpensive magazine. So that's the magazine, and this is a really thick one, Um, but you can do a 10 pager if you like, and then the final is a trade book. This is a trade book. The trade book is printed on a little less high quality paper than the photo books, but it's still really great quality printing. The printing is fantastic. They're very accurate toe what they look like on my screen there, very good printing, even though they're using kind of a thinner paper, and it's it's a little bit rougher, but I actually like the field paper and it's fantastic for a notebook. And so I've actually created a notebook for myself. This is an art notebook, so I have a little journal and I just kind of open up randomly to a page. And then I journal based on what I'm thinking about when I look at these photos, and a lot of times it turns out to be like a story about how the photo was taken or where I was or what I felt when I was there. So I've just been journaling inside of this notebook, and it's been a fun experience, But this is called a trade book, and these air really inexpensive so that the thickest, biggest one you can make is going to cost you 40 ish box or 50 bucks or something like that. But but you can make him for three or five bucks or six box or something like that and you can You can make a pretty decent book for very inexpensive price. So now what do I use them for? Other than making interesting little projects? I've made, uh, magazines for people who come to my workshops that they can take home and learn the information. Like is like a recap of the information at the workshop. I've also made albums for clients on, and then most of the time I make proof books for clients. And so this is an example of a proof book. It's got four up on one side and one picture on the other side. Very useful, very fun and nice proof books that the client actually wants to keep and and look at as almost a documentary of the wedding itself. So proof books are a great way to do this. This is a photo book proof book, but you can also use the trade book to make him. And this one generally costs me about $80 to press this one, because it's thick and it's hard covered and it's a photo book, so it's got the really high quality paper. But if I make a trade book I've made plenty of trade book proof books for clients that have smaller packages, and they didn't pay as much. I could make a trade book for 20 bucks of their wedding, and so there's every option possible. So now that you understand the books themselves, let's just trade choose to make a trade book and it's gonna ask me, Do I want to relay everything out? Yeah, I do. So that's the trade book. I can choose the size of the trade book here. So let's make an eight by 10 trade book. You can see that it starts at $19 for an eight by 10 trade book. I want a heart. Okay, let's see. God, relay that out, OK? And then I can choose a hard or a soft cover. I'm gonna choose a hardcover for this trade book, and I'm gonna choose color paper. Black and white Paper is fine, but I'm in a do color paper cause it's higher quality paper and I'm not gonna have ah, logo page. So now I'm at $22 to start this book and it will start increasing once I get to I think it's maybe 20 pages or something like that, where it starts ticking up based on the number of pages that I'm having. Okay, so once I'm ready to do that, all I need to Dio is go to this button here which says auto layout. And right now I have it set to a preset that creates a magazine for up. I don't want to do that. What I want to do is just one at a time. So I'm gonna show you how to edit a layout. We're gonna click edit auto layout and we're going to go here and it's showing the left page right page, and I get to choose what it's going to do on each page. And what I want to do is I want to do a fixed layout on the left page. Actually, let's do a blank page on the left page so nothing's gonna be on left page. Always gonna be on the right page and then on the right page, because I could set this up to safe random lay out from my favorite three, two and three image layouts on Bennett would just randomize those layouts, or I could do a fixed layout and say I want it to Onley show images this way so that there never full bleeds. Um, in fact, let's do this. Let's let's make a smaller image. So let's just say it's going to be based on this size one photo there. So it's gonna be a smaller image because it has to fit within that square. And I'm gonna tell it to fit within that square, not fill it but fit. And then I'm gonna turn off all these matching edges and add photo text. I don't want any text below the image itself, and then I'm going to go to the other page, and I'm gonna do a fixed layout and a full bleed on this page. Um, and I'm going to tell it to actually, Phil. So let's say we're going to fill this fixed layout full bleed, and then we're going to know adding text, If we add text, it would just add whatever text we asked it to add. And I'll show you where that option is in the menus in a minute. Um, so now what I want to do is save this as a new preset, so I never have to do this again. And so this one's going to say Ah, eight by 10. Trade left. Small right, full bleed. Okay, That gives me an idea of what What's gonna happen when I use this preset hit, create and then hit done. So now you can see that preset is there and I'm gonna auto layout this entire book. Now, just so you understand, if you go to the book drop down menu, you'll see that there's an option for book preferences and it's very small preferences. It's only when you auto fill, do you want it to zoom to fit or zoom to fill? So we're going to say exhumed fit. And then we're going to say, uh, we don't want to start by Otto feeling that gets annoying when you As soon as you show upto the book module, it just starts auto filling a book. So turn that off. And then this one, uh, is if you have text coming in on our preset. It's asking you, what do you want to put in there? And you can put in the title the caption or the file name, or just some filler text that you need to replace And so most of the time when I'm doing a proof book, I tell it to do file name because I just want to be 01020304 But when I'm doing something where I have actual caption information in the photos, if I do caption metadata, it would then have a box of photo information and it would put in like a paragraph that I had already written into the captions in the metadata. So we'll leave that on file name and close our book preferences. And now we're just gonna auto fill all of this stuff here is for after. So we've got our collection. We've got our images down here and we're just going to auto fill this book, and I reached a little hope. Okay, this is an interesting problem. So every once in a while, blurb will hang on. So see how it's got the images in my book. But then it's showing images from a wedding that I did previously right there. So we don't want those images, so I actually have to go and find him. There they are. So there's a whole bunch of images from a wedding that I did previously, and for some reason it just hangs onto him. So it's important for you to understand how to get rid of those things as well. So what I'm gonna dio is I'm just gonna go find those images right there, and I'm gonna highlight all of those images like this. And I want to get rid of those, um, removed from collection. So it needs to remove those images from the collection. And then I'm in at the relay out the book. So unfortunately, I don't know why it does it. It's a glitch that's inside a light room, and it's been happening for three years now, So just occasionally you'll end up with that. So this is how you have to do it. You have to actually delete them from the collection and then come back in and rebuild the book after you've deleted him from the collection. Okay, so now that we've cleared those images, you can see I've got a bunch of blink pages and I'm just going to click on this page and come all the way down here and shift click to se this page and I'm going to right click, and I'm gonna remove those pages and then I'm gonna save the book. So we're going to call this Ah, are book two, and it's going to save it right here. So it's actually gonna save inside of this collection itself. Um, and I'm going to choose the options here, so I'm saving it inside the current collection, and I'm going to I don't need to sync it with light room. Um, and I'm going to hit create if I made If you make new virtual copies, it actually kind of makes these independent of the original so that you can adjust them specifically for the book. So that's a good idea if you think you're gonna change the images because you want, like, two black and whites next to each other. And so you're gonna change when the black and white If you don't do this, if you don't make a virtual copy, you'll end up changing the original to black and white, so it's better to make a virtual copy when you're building a book. If you think you're gonna change the image, I'm not gonna change the images, so I'm not going to do it so I'm gonna create and I just made a book. So now, because those images, those stray images were removed from the the book itself and I deleted the pages. And then I saved it. That's what kind of locked this book in so that I no longer have to deal with those extra images. It's just really done that they're there. I've been trying to get him to fix it for years. Okay, so now you'll see that there's easel, exclamation points. Those exclamation points are going to tell us that this photo cannot be found. That's because they're offline. But that's OK, because I still have the images. I still have the, um, smart previews. I can work on the images. I just can't send it to blurb until I connect back to the original files. So just know that you can work on any books laws. You have your images in the catalogue and you have smart previous. You could play around with these, you can adjust the images you could do. Also, you just can't send to blurb until you reconnect to the original files so I could work on this on the plane on the way home, but I've got kind of a good start. And by the way, if you want Teoh make this process easier. Make sure that you organized the collection, move the images around until they're in the right groupings so that they that they're in the order that you want them to be in that way. Once you put him in here, it's It's gonna be really easy to flow through this.