Lessons

Lesson Info

Intro to Print & Book Module

Now that we have our images adjusted and perfected now it's time to start sharing those images so today is all about sharing and our very first way of sharing is going to be with books um inside of light room we have a book maker book module you also have on let me let me go in here you also have a print module so there's a there's, a book module and a print module. The print module is made for the idea of printing out ah print on your abs and printer maybe a set of prints you can make picture packages so that you can have an eight by ten and three five by sevens and things like that. So if you if we wanted to say print out a series of photographs of trade jin here um and we went to the print module we could click on the top left or right hand corner here and see this picture packages option and and when we click on that then we have the ability to create a picture package. So for instance, I could simply and picture packages can include several different ways you can go different ways...

like for instance, you can add, you know certain sized prints you just click on these little I want an eight by ten and what it's doing is it's intelligently trying to figure out where the where I can fit these things see how is just trying to fit them everywhere so if you need three five by sevens on eight by ten and two four by six is so that you can share them for christmas or for whatever purposes that's that's what this is for and then you can either print these on your printer at home so you can print them on your photo printer or you can come down to the bottom of the print job area and you can change that from printer instead of putting in and printer you khun printed to a j peg, he printed two ajay paige you get to choose the file resolution size whether or not you're going to be sending it to a glossy or matte paper on dh how much sharpening you want on the print. Once you print that out, it's going to go to a j peg somewhere on your disk wherever you tell it to go and then you can take that to your printer. So you've got a pre created print package and you're going to send that to your printer. So that's, what the picture packages for, um and all of these things if I decided that I really that I'm going to do this same picture package over and over and over again every time I want tto give a gift oh you know the kid's grandparent's or whatever I can then save that as a pre set here in the template browser so I just simply click on that plus button and then I named the preset so that it's a new template of what I'm goingto so then from then on now all I have to do is click on a specific template and I will have that vir I don't have toe I don't have to keep setting this up I have it all set and it's ready to go so uh that's that's really all the nuts and bolts to the print module it's very simple very easy to use but it's a great way to share things when you want to and and I use it more so when I'm creating absent prince I haven't epps and printer that's what I use on dh so if I want to create you know a nice print on an eleven by fourteen piece of paper then I'm gonna click on the eleven by fourteen it gives me a thirteen by nine print on eleven by fourteen pay or this is actually thirteen by nineteen it's eleven by fourteen image but once I've got that then I just choose the print that I want to go in the paper and it sets it up for me and I've just set up the parameters as to where I want it to be so I can show you the grid so down here you can about midway down this right hand panel you khun say, show the guides and it shows you okay within this box here I'm going to put a picture and if it's a square picture, I'm going to fit it within there at the very top you can tell it to zoom to fill it or you can check that off and then it will always just fit the picture within that frame but the frame won't print the frame is just showing you where it's going to be and that's why you can turn it off that's what the print will look like, um, you can also tell it where you want that cell to be. Um, you can tell how big you want it to be right here. It's an eleven by fourteen you can tell it where it's going position that so if you wanted a little bit more bottom wait, you could take this bottom slider here and slide it up, and it gives more sexy increasing the size of of the the bottom margin, which pushes the print up a little bit. And so, generally speaking, if your printing, um you want more space on the bottom, then you want on the top and that just gives it call it wait, so you waited up a little bit um and so take that bottom margin instead of having it down here just push it up a little bit and then you'll have your print up the top of the print. Um so if I click on this one it's going that's what it's gonna look like if I wanted to zoom to fill it so it's a true eleven by fourteen just simply do that and hit print um but once you established what you like then it's very easy if you just create yourself a template, then every time you want to print on your printer here uh, whether it's an absent canner cannon or whatever it is um you just simply go to the print module click on the picture you want click on that template that you want and print no more fussing around with things because you've already got dialed in the other thing that's important to know about print module is down at the very bottom you can change print adjustments so if if you got your monitor calibrated which you did last night good job um and that's important you made a note that's important when you when you calibrate your monitor we talked about that last night if you're on an apple when you go there there's a there's a dummy mode and then there's a expert mode click expert and that's, when you get the little apple and you get to choose and that's when you're really going to get a good calibration the regular modes not going to give you a great calibration so do the do the expert mouth I have one question it has like a listing it had like the color spaces on the side and I didn't know if that made like add mac and head rgb and it's our baby and I just did mine and named it after them right? So you just named it whatever. Yeah, so when you name your profile I always name it the date that I made it. Okay that's what I named mine so that's the way to name your profile was just the date that way you always know I haven't updated this for a while so um but down at the bottom here, if you've if you've gotten your caliber your monitor calibrated so you know you've got accurate color here and then you print it out on your printer and comes out of your printer and you look at it and it's a little dark or it's a little light or it's not quite as contrast e that's what this print adjustment area down here is for so if you come down here you can see print adjustment you click on that, then you can change the brightness and contrast of but the print's gonna look like so if if you want it so you're going to look at this print are this picture and then your screen and then you're gonna look a print and at the print needs more contrast at a little contrast printed again until the print looks like your screen and then save it as a template and then this print adjustment will always be in with that specific paper and with that and and it's paper by paper because some papers or more contrast other papers or not, and we're going to see that today when we go look at some books, we're going to see that different paper types have different feel to them and you have to combat that feel with certain adjustments. Um, and so in our case, if we're printing to a printer here and its words, they were printing to a matte paper, you want to create a template for the matte paper on that printer don't just make a template for a size of paper make your templates for the size of paper and the quality of the paper and the type of the paper and each one of those and you'll typically only print to like two or three different types of sizes of papers, so just make one for each of them so that you know, if I'm using that paper, this is my template because it'll have a different print adjustment than a glossy paper will so um so that's available to their, um the color management uh if you if you understand color management then what you want to do you khun come in here and you could take all of the every paper manufacturer has what's called a profile to their paper and that profile tells the printer and the the computer what kind of color definitions are in the printer so the printer sees color in a different way than maybe your monitor sees it and so it's a translation because you calibrated your monitor that's the definition of color on your monitor the printer profile is the definitions of color on the printer it's kind of like a say in english and french dictionary and now there's a translation that has to occur when the computer sends it to the printer has to translate its definition of red two printers definition of red so that they talk correctly they understand each other on and they get the same red. And so if you were if you understand uh if you understand color management simply go find that profile for that paper and bring it and put it in here. Where do you put that? Do you remember when we talked about the of the preferences panel? So when we went to the preferences panel here um inside of light room and we went to the preferences of the presets preset preferences and we clicked on show light room preset folder color profiles are right there, so any color profile you want to have access to you just put it right here and it will be available now. The other way you get profiles in there is when you install printer driver it will often install it's standard profiles in there, so if you're using an absent printer with abs and paper and you install the printer driver, it will install all of its profiles in there. And if you got a profile from safe from a lab that you worked with, if you got that's where it would that's where it goes, yeah, so if you know that you have a labs, whatever love it is and they have a profile take that, put it inside of that profile area and it will be available. The light room. All right, if you're not familiar with, uh, color management and scares you, that idea scares you, then just allow your printer to manage it and use the printer adjustments and you should get pretty close. Bayern does a good job talking to printers. All right, so if, uh, you want to do more than just print so that's the first way of sharing done, we want to hit a print send it out to our printer on her desktop or printed to a jpeg and send it off to somebody to print that's the first way that we can share our images that's kind of the old school way of sharing, isn't it? We used to just print in fact, I remember my first experience as a photographer wass I took my we're studying I wasn't an art or anything we're just studying in humanity's we're studying artists and we would every time we studied an artist, my friend and I would we would mock those artists by reproducing what they had done so like we'd study jackson pollock and so then we go home and weed take a sheet of my, you know, out of the linen closet and we'd spill paint all over and then we take it to school and show our teacher that that's ridiculous we could do that too, you know? And then you know, we'd still study louise nevelson and so we'd go home and find a bunch of random blocks of wood and pasted together and spray painted black and they'll see what we can do that too like and we just mock the whole idea, right? That was r lack of understanding of art and, you know, invention but anyway, so we were that was our purpose was to mock well, we got studying ansel adams and I said, well how hard can that me you know you have to do is point your camera something pretty and you've got a pretty picture so right so I just have to go find pretty things so I took my mom's camera and I drove out I grew up on a ranch so we drove out on this ranch and and we drove around all day long looking for interesting things to take pictures of and when I finished I came home and I was all film and I took it to the drug store and in my town my hometown there was more cows than people on dso the drug store it was like a little tiny drugstore and they had to send the film off maybe phoenix or I don't know where to get it developed and then it was like a week later you would get the proofs back and then you could go through the proofs and then you a week later you could get an eight by ten back you know? So it's a very long process so that was my way of printing stuff back then on dh so it's a much faster process now where aiken just send it to my ipad and I've got a little print that I can carry around with me or I've got a on you know I can print to my printer and I'm instantaneously got it or I can you know send it to white house custom color and they'll literally white house guy khun sense of the white house custom color today and I can have it tomorrow and they're on the other side of the country that's amazing to me and when I was growing up, I had to send my film away and we're like a week and a half or whatever to get proofs back is amazing. So how far we've come just in my lifetime? Um, so I have no idea why I told you that story, I guess just to tell you that things have gotten better in the printing world. But that's, how we share images today so we share them in print. Don photography. You couldn't repeat ansel adams, but you could do jackson pollock and the other girl. Oh, well, yeah, I guess that's sure. The reason that there you have to have two things to get hooked on something. Um first it has to be, um you have to be good at it. You have to be decently good at it so that it gives you hope. And so when I came back from that trip taking pictures, everybody raved about the photographs, and so I had an initial success, and so that got me interested in it, but if I was really good at it, and it didn't take any effort, you can't get hooked on it because it's not challenging, so you've got to be good at it first, but it's also got to be some kind of a challenge, and so at first, I thought, oh, well, fine, and I was going to dismiss it, but then I ended up trying to take a class in it when I first went to college, because I wasn't always going to be a photographer. When I got to college, I was going to an actor or a director or something like that. I was I was a theater major, and I took a class just on a whim. I took a photography class, and I was horrible. I couldn't repeat anything I'd done that first day and so that's the challenge. So then the challenge, the gauntlet was thrown down, and I had to then work hard, and so there was that initial success. I knew I could be good, but I also knew it was hard, and those two things to gather get you hooked on something at least an activity, it gets you hooked on activity. So anyway, um, so we share with prince, but we also want teo prints are problematic and that their one one at a time, and so you don't tell you can tell a story with one photograph, but sometimes you want to tell a story with a lot of photographs, which means we need to go to a different form either we need to go to a slideshow and he'd go to video we need to go to some other form and books are a perfect form for that because now you can tell a story and like you're going to go out and do a photo essay that's great so you could either do a book or a magazine or something like that where you're going to tell the story in a number of pictures making a book is a fantastic experience I don't do physical scrapbooking my wife does that she loves the experience of physically scrapbooking stuff. Um I love the experience of making a a book it's, justin and it's an entertaining experience to try and put images together and pair them up to tell a story and and how do you sequence those images? And and I love turning a page and having this new picture show up and do you make it small or do you make it big? You know that all those things they're really fun to play with and so the experience of making a bookstore really it's an entertaining one it's fun because you are then taking elements that already exists and you re organizing it I'm creating something brand new out of it. You're telling a story with it. And a lot of times you can tell a story that wasn't even there because of the way you pair up images that says different things.