Lessons

Lesson Info

The Print Module

Next up, let's talk about the print module. This is where you would print images. There's a little secret though to the print module that I love. And that is you can print to actual physical paper but you can also print to a Jpeg file. And that doesn't seem like a big deal. But it is, I'll show you how you can use that to increase your social media online presence. But before we do that, I noticed right at the end when I was doing the slide show that there were a couple of things that were a little bit wonky. The first was the logo that I showed you was in low resolution and I'm not sure why that is if we go back into Light room. All I did is between sessions. I just took this and I wiggled it around just to check to see maybe it wasn't the right uh image I didn't bring in the right logo but it was and then I played it and then check this out. It's just fine. So I think light room just had a little hiccup and that's why that logo was looked low resolution. But I haven't changed anythin...

g about this except for I just sort of wiggle this around and then played it again. So I'm not sure why that happened is just one of those things. The other thing I forgot to mention is the very last thing is that we need to create a saved slideshow. So, like the book module, if you have a slide show that's all set up and you might want to play it again later, you can click create saved slideshow and I'm gonna say this is uh Karen slide show and I'll save this in the Karen collection when I say create. Now we can see that in our collection over here. We have the Karen slide show and we have the motorcycle diaries, book those show up in our collections. The other thing I did not mention is you can export these two videos so you can do a video at 10 80 p video that will save this, that can be played back on external devices and things. So if you do want to save this slide show that you've created as a video that you give to people at your event or wedding, there is, that capability is just over there in the lower left hand corner and so there you have it. Okay, let's move on to the print module. Now, if you haven't noticed by now, the book module and the slideshow module and the print module all share the same workflow. So when we go over here, you can see on the left hand side, just like the slideshow module. We have a template browser that allows us to figure out what kind of print we want to make. In the bottom down here, we have our thumbnail of images that we've got from our collection. And so in fact, let me go back over here to my collections, I'll choose Karen. And so here we have all of those images that we created in the Karen folder are in the Karen collection. So we can choose from these. If I didn't want these, I could go back to the library, choose some other ones and put them in a collection, but that's sort of how you choose it. It's the same exact thing as the book module. So we're not going to cover that again because we already know it. Okay, let's figure out these templates over here. So to understand these templates. So we have presets that come with Light Room Classic, and then we also have the ability to create our own custom templates. Think of them as presets for printing. And so they're called templates but there something that you would set up once saved that, then you can use it over and over. And so this is all very familiar throughout Light Room Classic. It's the same kind of workflow. The thing to understand though is when you're printing files, you're either printing. If you have four images, you might print four different versions of one image. So you might print an eight by 10 of of an image image, 14 by six of that same image. A bunch of smaller images to cut up of that same image. So you might have three or four or five pages with the same image repeated over and over and over in different sizes that you can chop up and then present to a client as a picture package. So way back when I was growing up when you have school photos, that's how you got your school photos. So you would have one or two large photos. You have a couple of smaller photos. Then you always had there were like passport photos just on this big sheet that you would chop up and give those out to all of your friends and family. And it was a whole package of images. So you can do that. That's one way to print in the print module. The other way is to take multiple images and lay them out and print them on a single piece of paper. So you might have a collage or a trip tick or something like that. So just pay attention to that. As we're going forward. It's either one image that's printed in multiple different formats or it's a single format with different areas for different prints. More like a book would be okay back into this module. You can see right here that we have the same image of Karen over and over on this piece of paper, one large and four small. And so that is a picture package. That's what that is. A single image is something like this where you just have one image per page. And so these guys over here are a mix of those two different things. So there's a mix of a single image or something. That is a picture package. How do you know which is which you can find out by looking up here on the right hand side. It's the layout style. You want a single image Or a contact sheet. In other words, one image over and over on a sheet. Do you want to picture package which is a single image delivered in a different formats? Or do you want a custom package? That's where you can lay out multiple images on a single piece of paper. So let's go through and work with a few of these. So if you're just getting stuff out to a client or you want to do this really quickly, just go over here to the left hand side, choose a template browser that fits your needs. This is a picture package. And by the way, it's really important to understand if you're using all the filmstrip photos or the selected photos or the flag photos down here in the toolbar. So I have all filmstrip photos selected and When I choose this it's two images. But notice I'm going to be printing 112 pages. That's because I am printing every single image in the thumb the filmstrip, which is 112 images. That's too many. So I instead I'm going to say selected photos. And now when I choose one image it's only printing one page. So if I choose two images, it's two pages. 3 images and I can go page by page and see exactly what I'm printing. So that's what these little arrows are. Over here on the left hand side. I can go page by page and see what's happening. Okay, so some of those those are the navigational tools and the selections that were going to be doing in this. Okay, So if we choose a single image, let's just create a single image output will choose fine art matt. And so that is what this is. Then I will go choose the image that I want to print. So let's say it's this image right here. So that is fantastic. All I would need to do is then choose which printer I'm using. So I don't have any printers hooked up right now except for this Samsung which is not the greatest printer. But I can choose the printer and the copies and all the stuff that you do with the printer. And then I would say prince and group this would print out and it's all good. A few things that you can do, some options that you have. You might be using a rotary cutter to cut this out or to frame it or format it. And so you can show guides. So these are the guides that help us lay this out. So when this is printed it will look like this. These guys aren't going to show up. But when you do print this out, you might want to add crop marks. So let me turn off the guides. So if you add crop marks or page info, page numbers, whatever you want to add there, this will help you line up your ruler or your razor blade or whatever to cut out this image so that it is accurate. So you can choose to have those on or not. The other thing that you can do is you can change the background color of the page if you don't want it to be paper color for whatever reason. So you can add some, some colour to your prints if you want. You can also add an identity plate just like we did before in our slideshow. You can go in here, you can use text, you can use a graphic background. So I will go in here and we will use that same old logo that we've been using all along. I'll say okay and now we have this so it can be printed as well. So you can put your logo on your prints if you want. That's just called an identity plate. So you can add that to your stuff. You can put that on every single image. So it's like a watermark, it shows that. Or you can actually watermark your images and guess what we have. All those presets that we created. All we have to do is choose one and it will show up to all that time that we took to create those watermark presets. Now all we have to do is click a button and choose one that works and it's going to print. It's really great. The other thing you can print is the photo info, the file name or the sequence of the exposure or whatever you want. And you can click, edit and do what we've done all along. You can pull stuff from your metadata and add that to your image. Just like we did with the book module and the slideshow module, just like we can do here and in the web module and everywhere else. So we've already learned that. But you're just seeing this over and over again. I don't want that photo info and then you can then go down and do all of your final image stuff, the print sharpening and resolution, the color management, all the stuff that you would normally do to print an image. The print module is very straight forward. Now let's say that we want to do something a little bit different. Let's say we want to do instead of a single print a picture package. So for this you can again go through here and choose um what is. So here's a contact sheet of 5x9 images. And so you can repeat one photo per page. So there they are, it's a bunch of five by nine or five by eight. Contact sheet, repeat photo one photo per page. There it is. You can just turn on and off these until you get exactly what you want. Or my favorite thing is to add a custom package. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to choose fine art matt and then say no at a custom package you can see that I have these little boxes here. These boxes represent frames or areas that you can put images into. So I'm going to hit delete delete, delete now, a blank page. That was just a blank page. And this is one of the fun things that you can do here. So in this area right over here you have cells. That's what those squares are called cells and you can add specific sizes to those cells. And so I could have hit clear layout to get rid of all of those other cells before instead of delete. That's probably the fastest way. But what you can do here is define what you want to print for your client. So I want to print 18 x 12 or eight x 10 and I'm going to go french 14 by six, maybe by sixes. So I'm going to separate this a little so I can slice them up And maybe 1, 34567 eight 2.5 by 3.5 images. They can slice and dice. So now I have this custom layout so if I choose an image, I can put that in there and then drag that up and down. It's going to fit that, it's going to fill that and so I can rotate that to fit. It's not going to do that. I can check this to see if it's got inner stroke or not. I don't want an inner stroke but you can see I can adjust that two different sizes or whatever and so whoops I am on the wrong, the wrong cell. There we go. There we go. So if I do rotate to fit photo border now it's applying to this one over here. I can do inner strokes whatever I want. I can lock the photo to the aspect ratio so that's going to make sure that the whole photo prints or not. It's all kinds of things. You can do that and then I can start adding different photos to this so that I have not just one photo, but a bunch and I can just start dropping these in here. Um it's just really fun. So I can create a custom package and drag and drop my images inside of these different cells. And then when I'm done then I can go ahead and print. So that seems pretty straight forward. So we have templates that allow us to print one image in multiple ways. We have templates that allow us to print one image repeatedly so that we can output different sizes to our clients. We have custom packages that we can sort of do custom layouts and there's one more thing that we can do. We can create custom paper sizes and custom packages for output to jpeg files. And I use this all the time for my instagram stories. So let me show you how to do that. So if we go over here, I am going to clear this layout and I have this single page. So I know that an instagram story should be a nine x 16 aspect ratio. So I can go over here to my page setup and I'm going to change this From us letter to this nine x 16 inches. So I have already typed this in by changing my customer size and I have typed in nine inches by 16 inches. It doesn't matter if it's inches or feet or miles, It's just the aspect ratio that we care about. And then I've added that as a preset And it's called, I've added it here, I've put in nine By 16, that's how I did that. So you hit the plus first and then you have a nine by 16. So I saved this one as instagram story and I think I did another demo previously and I saved that by nine by 16. So I'm just gonna choose one that I previously created. But you can see that's how you create it. I'll say okay. And so I will say again, okay, now I have this long vertical um page. Remember I'm printing to a file, not to a piece of paper. So that's why it doesn't matter what the units are, it's the aspect ratio that matters. And then what I can do here is I can then go in and I can start adding these little cells to this. And so what I'll do here is I'm going to go in and I will add a new cell and I'm going to add it This five x 3, 3, 3 x nine. And I added that. So 5.333 is 16 divided by three. So that's where I got that. So I'm gonna add one, So I have three cells, three unique cells. And this page. So now I can start adding an image. I'll go over here and I'll add an image and then I'll go over here and add an image and that's pretty cool. All works. I need to uncheck, lock Photo, two aspect ratio. But anyway, I have these three images And it's a nine x 16. And now what I can do is I can change my print from print to printer to print to Jpeg file. And then I can choose what my resolution should be. My sharpening, I'll change this standard, my media type. It doesn't really matter. I'll say glossy because screens or glossy And I'll change this jpeg quality maybe to 80. And then S RGB and I'll say print to file. That's going to say, where do you want to put that? I'm gonna put this on my fake hard drive and exports and I'm going to save this as a fake insta story and I'll save that drunk and that's going to print to a Jpeg file. It's essentially the exact same thing as exporting the file. But this allows me to do a custom export. And so now what I can do is I will go over to my fake, my light room hard drive to my fake hard drive to exports and I have my fake insta story. There it is. So I can take this, I can transfer it to my iphone and then add that to my instagram story from my iphone or there's other ways I can get this image from my hard drive over to instagram. But you get the idea now I have this nine by 16, I could also go in. So I've already created some other custom templates. I created this one right here. Um, I have this Mark Wallace thing. I don't want to use that. So what I could do is I could uh instead make a identity identity plate and I'll use a graphical web plate. So what I'll do is I'm gonna go, I have some logos on my light room hard drive that you don't have in your classroom files. That's okay because they are copyrighted. So this one right here, Mark on a bike, that's my other alter ego mi riding around on a motorcycle. I'll choose that one. It's really big. And that's okay. I'll say use that one. So now I have this graphic that I can put their something like that. And then I will go over here to my collections and I want to use my motorcycle, not Karen anymore. And let's put maybe this image up here and this little image in here and this little image in here, something like that. And this little image in here, you get the idea. I can save print to file and then I'll save this and my exports as mark on a bike. I'll do that. I'll save that and it's going to print to a file. And then if we go over here to my exports, we have my Mark on uh, Mark on a bike file and there you go, you have these four images and a logo. And then I can upload that to instagram and add some instagram text up here and some calls to actions and some wacky graphics and all that stuff that the kids do these days and it works really great. And if it's a print that I'm going to use over and over, and guess what, we can do the exact same thing that we did with the slide show and book module. I can create a saved print. So maybe there's a layout that I use a lot for promoting stuff or showing off things. It doesn't matter. But the print module is pretty awesome because you can print not only to a physical piece of paper, glossy piece of paper, whatever it is, you can also print to a file and a custom size and then you can take basically light room and use it for doing custom layouts that previously, you would only be able to do that in something like Photoshop or illustrator or something. You have to export all those files and then move them all around and layer them and add shadows and stuff. You can use the print module now to do all that stuff and then just print it to a file. It's really awesome. Okay, well that's the print module. Next up, it's the Web module.