Lessons

Lesson Info

Adding Text and Space to a Book Layout in Lightroom CC

And then I can come over this page and click on it and say I want this to be a text page and now I can start typing text in here and I can say charlie and dad so charlie and dad and then I have the same character abilities come in here and I'm centering it and then I'm centering it vertically as well so it's in the middle and then I'm going to increase the size just a bit and I'm going tio uh I don't know do that no it's very um so so like trey jin's writing it charlie and bad and so that would be that page and I really think that when you're designing something when you when you when you get the opportunity to peacefully and you know back off and show an image that you can really have someone really you know, dig into and look at take the opportunity and I think this is one of those opportunities where you get to just say, you know what this is this is something that he liked to do with his dad and I would I would just they would just walk around the halls together and he would just r...

ide you know and that was just something that they could do together and they couldn't go running they couldn't go play baseball so this is what they did and that's a moment that really, really matters it's kind of a strange little moment for us to think about but for them it's really critical so when you have the opportunity teo, do that take the time, open it up, give yourself some white space and then put the important image in there and let people rest on it for a bit and then go back into the story so we're still you know, we're doing all this kind of stuff, so we've got lots of, you know, introduction this that we're telling a story and then just let us rest and let us see the moment that matters and then go back on this story again because I can promise you that if you clutter up your book all the time and you just got lots of pictures everywhere and you never take the moment to stop and let people in just a one single picture than all of those amazing pictures are going to get lost in the shuffle because they're just too much around them. So it's kind of like I was I was in new york one time and I was walking around new york city and I and I was just I was walking for I was doing workshops at the time and I went to a workshop on back and I was kind of going back and forth and so during the day I'd walk to and from the workshop and so I walked in downtown and I would and I was in it's always rush hour there and so people are always walking around and every time I stopped at a street corner I would kind of look at the people people watch and I was amazed at how many beautiful people were in new york city just beautiful people beautiful guys, beautiful girls like everybody was just beautiful you know? They're always dressed well and they looked great businessmen and I'm sure a lot of models there and a lot of you know and everybody that works in a store looks like a model because they have to sell whatever they're wearing or whatever there spraying on you're and so I was like and everybody looks good here and nobody did they were all just the same it was like a bunch of beautiful people you like whatever you guys they're all beautiful who cares? Like now at this point the ugly people are the ones that are attractive you know? You're like oh elise there's someone over there that doesn't look pretty I'm interested in that person and so if you have a bunch of beautiful pictures on one page none of the matter anymore so you got to really take a moment to just pull it out and just give the one picture the opportunity to shine especially that one picture can tell a story all by it itself and I think that this uh page is an example of a photo that can tell a story all on its own and so just let it do that led to tell the story and then get back into the you know, the nitty gritty of the story and the details all right, ok, so if you are designing your album and we're not going to design an entire album in front of you because clearly you know it'll take time for you to play around with it toe work with it at text and but hopefully you can see all of the options that you have in front of you now remember your text editor here has the control that any other text editor has so if I hit enter and again enter and then I start typing something else I could completely at this point change into a completely did you know, into aerial or something like that and then I could talk about charlie that's a charlie is trey jin's um I v drip system and I can you know, flop, evolve, evolve, evolve blah, blah, blah and this could be this story part of you know what you're writing and so once you've done that you have your story written and now we're going toe you know, this is going to be designed differently, then say this part is and notice that it's too far it's like the story's going way too out here I want the text to be kind of like this and so the same things that apply to the photos in the padding area also apply to our text so if I unlinked all of these and I take the right in like that let's go to there so that's headed at ninety let's just go to ninety in and then let's go to the next one and say ninety I don't want to do that one I want to do the left top up here ninety see that and now I've got my text kind of in the center and I don't want it to be that big because that's the same size of this up here so I'm going to come down to the size of the text that I'm going to put it at say fourteen so that's too small but let's do it eighteen all right so there's your text and now you've got a short little story or a short little bit and then some kind of a title so you have all of the ability that you have in any text editor toe work here and type of your stories and do your magic on your on your text and then your photos on the other side of the page and I really really think that this is an excellent way to design a book to have photos on one side text on the other and really, if you wanted to get down to it, one of the fastest ways to design a book is to instead of trying to allow light room to try and light room to try and design, you know, some tricky designed for you sometimes the best way to design is to just simply choose a full one page one one image per page and then just clear the layout and start over on day. I'll show you the difference then if you do an entire, you know, book one image per page, so if I say one auto layout, one image per page see that you've got one pit, one picture per page and then sometimes you'll come in and you'll say, ok, now this does well on its own page, but so I need to add a blank page here, so now I've got out there say, so I've got a blank page added there and let's have one more blank page now there I've got what I just wanted to accomplish with that one I can if I like where it is, I can also grab it and drag it around with inside of this frame so I could drag like this or if I go in here and I do a full bleed that it's really easy to put that on the edge like that, so I've got a full bleed page of full bleed image on this edge is there but it's the whole image instead of kind of slivered like we had before I contained this into my text at it again and now I'm ready to type my story here on dh then when I see something here where I'm like ok, this one could be a whole story I could say I'm going to grab this one and I want four photos on it click like that and then just grabbed these and start dragging in and grab this one and drag it in and grab this one and dragon in and grab this one and dragging in and then I highlight all of those guys and I'm in a right click and zoom to fill and then you see so so now you're seeing it laid out in the story line and then you're collecting images into pages and then you just start deleting pages you don't need so you'll say ok, I don't need all of these pages so I'm gonna right click I'm gonna bring that one over here so that people are bringing gift so you can see on this here we've got him bringing a gift and then bringing a gift like everyone's bringing stuff to him on dh so now I've got a blank page that I don't need and so I can shift click that right click it and remove that set of pages so that's another way to work to instead of instead of trying to work off a design that it came up with, just give the one picture per page all the way across and then start designing it based on I see the pictures in front of me, and now I need to rearrange them and move them and give space to this one in space, and you're and what happens is your book start to x number of pages, so let's say, starts at one hundred thirty pages because there's one hundred thirty photos, and then it starts growing and then and really, I think that these books I actually waste a lot of paper on the books because I want them to be sick. And so the thicker that book is, the better off it's going to look so you know that it really needs to be about that thick, which means that you really want almost two hundred pages in your book for it to get that thick now blurb can go up to four hundred pages, but it only goes to two hundred forty inside of light room, so in light room, you can get up to two hundred forty pages, and then it cuts you off at that point, you can't make a bigger book, but you're making a two hundred forty page book that's probably enough the only time that I need more than two hundred forty pages is if I have a really extra thick proof book, but usually my proof book. If I can try and keep it under the two hundred forty pages because that's about the right size for a proof book. Any questions so far on that? Excellent. So as we go down, let me just show you some more of the controls here inside of your layout area, but you've got your book settings here, you've got you're outta layout. We've talked about our our temple it's right here. Another thing that you should know about the templates is this. If I were to take, say this, lay out let's, go to this one right here. So this is our layout and let's say that I wanted to create a layout that was a full bleed image. Um and that it was I had dragged this all the way up to the top. So I that's the layout that I want it to be, so I want, but I wanted to be forced up there, so I'm gonna unlinked all these, grabbed the bottom and drag it all the way to the top like that, so I want that to be my layout. If that's the way out I want to keep you right click here first so you right click on the page and you're going to go down to the bottom and you're going to say save it is a custom page once you save it is a custom page do you see what it just did it created a page that has a gray area here that shows you that that's where the photo would be and then it's blank here so now you don't have to keep doing that and if you click and here go up to custom pages you can see all of the custom pages that have been made and so this is one of those custom pages which you can then also favorite so that when it's auto designing it would design on lee with your custom pages so those are things that you can due to speed up the process so from here on out then when we're designing if I go to a page and say oh I want you know these these guys right here to be a custom page so let's say I wanted to go all right this I need another page in front of here watch this blank page here so then we get that you know introduction to our friends I wanted to look like this right click and auto fill it there we go so that's the page that we wanted in the first place where we're introducing him to the friends and then over here if I wanted to take this guy I could move him over to this page here and I'm going to write to fight click this and going to my custom pages click on here see how puts him up on the top there so it looks like they're on a shelf and then it's white up here and white on the bottom that's pretty good design and so now that's a fun little uh paige I think that what's that looks pretty fun and then if I wanted to this is probably good place see how it's white all the way up there and then there's white down here so at this point what we could do is click on this page and we could go over to the photo text area and then grabbed the text and move it down to the center here and then we'll highlight that text and let's just say good friends and we'll go into our text editor and really increase the size of that we're going to center it we're going to put it in the middle and we want to raise it up just a little bit so that's right there and then we're going to put on the color itself will make it kind of ah fairly light color actually weaken click on here and go right to there so it's exactly that color and then turn that off and so you khun and then I've got you know, various uh caption data so if you had if you knew there was a caption in this photo that you wanted so if we had if we had say written the caption you could just that will drop down once you create the photo and it's not page text it's photo text once you created the photo text if you clicked on that you could grab the caption click on it and it would pull the caption and put it in there so in which case we would want it to be smaller text because of captions written so we would go to in the library let me show you where he can internal caption text so here oh, we have some trade jin's first chemo treatment at phoenix children's hospital is the caption with uh on looking friends who stuck with him every step of the way right? Okay, so there's your text. So now if you once you have that caption text in there not only is it useful to you to search for images or blogging images because you can have a caption go into the blogged but also you can in the book module if you came here and instead of having that friends text really large you could have it you know be say twenty point text and then you could come over and click on this this is going to be that big in order to see that click on that, and then we would just say caption and there they are so there's the caption, and at that point I would highlight all that, and I would change them to say if eighteen and they're out, and I think that probably, uh, we ought to put, like, a go over here to our patting and let's just increase the padding so that it see that that looks better and then let's, right, let's left justify it so that it feels a little bit more like you're writing a paragraph about it. That's good, I like that, but see if you've already written some of that stuff in the captions now, you congee draught in into the photo itself, so those are some of the tools that you can use to design remember that you also have the ability to bring in backgrounds so you can use the backgrounds here. So if I'm on this page and I want to add a background to it, I can do two things I can either go in and grab a photograph and drag it into here, and when I do that, see how it ghosts it in the background. So now you've got like, these toy elements in the background on dh, you can change the capacity to one hundred percent or down to zero percent, so you have the ability to do that, which means that if you wanted to come up with a whole bunch of textures, all you need do is bring those images, those texture images in so when you're shooting a story and you see a texture on a wall or some wood or the rock, just go in and get the texture of the rock of the wood or the whatever or the legos. If I'm shooting a kid's story, take top of legos and take some details of legos and then use the legos as a background just drag it in, and then it'll becoming background, you can scale it in and out, and that will be something interesting for the back of your photo, but you can also use their so if I, if I'm doing a travel log, I can actually use their background, and now I've got like a sea that it's like a it's like a map so I can have a math there that is the background, but you can make your own, so if you go and make a on interesting line drawing that you want his backgrounds, just save it as a j peg, put it into your catalog inside your light from catalog and then once you have it in there you khun you khun b putting it into all sorts of backgrounds so you've got the ability to do a lot of design elements right inside of light room and then once you're done with your book, all you need to do is hit this send a blurb and it's on its way to blurb soon as it's done soon as its sent it all to blurb it's going to turn around, send it back to you, open up a website order book and you're done or go up to the top change that to j peg or two pdf and send it out as a pdf or as a j peg set of pages yeah box stuff that you were doing when you pulled in that caption now if you had not highlighted that other portion, would it have added that or is it a complete replacement every time or can you edit that at this point now that's pulled in that caption well let's find out so we've got we've got a uh we got a hard return now let's go and see if we can get that file name now I just replaces it I would be a good idea what that would be great if you could pull that in, but you know what if you like didn't highlight it and then or is that what we just did like yeah that's what we just did I put my cursor ok ok so it's just that box is either custom text or it's one or the other of those things got you but I suppose what you could do is you could always say oh well I know there's something else in there so I need the file names who grabbed the file name copy it and then go back pull that in and type and then pit paste so that would be one way to accomplish that or aban well no you can only add that's you can only add one box per photo and so you have one photo on the page you can have one photo box and you can have one page box so on a given page you can have a photo text which is tied to the photo itself and then you can also add a page text so when you have page text now I can drag the page text over the over here so they can be right next to each other so you could use one of the title and one is a you know so I could come in with the page text and put page text right there and then I could make the page text you know, very in a large and I could this is where I could say good friends and then take that put it center so there, now you've got two things you've got good friends and then you've got that photo text was this drawing from the photo and then once you've done that interestingly enough, you could then take this if that's a really cool page and you like that page now, I can go over to my page area here, right? Click here and aiken save that is accustom page and now look at look at the way this page looks it's got a photo it's got page, text up top and then it's got caption text below. And so the next time I use that, if I go to say this photograph here or let's, go to a different page and let's do this page right here, and if I click on this and go to my custom pages, go down to the bottom and click that see what happens, it just automatically pulled in a bunch of text and now I'm going to go into that, uh, design and then I just need to, you know, tweak with it because I think that it didn't draw in my text information like the size of it, but if I grab this and size it down, oh no, you know, happen is the page tax become became the big text, and anyway, some but it gives you those two spots type in your information and then but the bulk of what you needed to do was done and then you type in the information so when you're working most of the time in in light room I'm making proof books and so my job is not a matter of designing you know really specific things it's mostly designing you know quick auto of four up with the file name and then pages that air full bleed and will not full bleed but full images so that you can see what they look like it's only occasionally that I make a book like this inside of light room and then I'm using text so there's a lot of places in here where I will take let's see here so I'm using text like interesting quotes a baby is born with a need to be loved and never outgrows it you know and so that's fun for people to read so it's like this one when I grow up I want to be a little boy I love that shot but I think that's a really great use for the the uh the light room book module so really don't complicate your books try and keep him simple I like one picture for page very rarely do I really want to go into very rarely do I want to go into multiple pictures in this case two pictures does does the whole thing justice so it's very funny because my favorite this look right here that look like what, anyway, so these air great, uh, tools for making and sharing your when you when you have images, you need to share him. So this is a great tool to do that. But the first thing that you have to keep in mind when you're designing your books and working is that you have to do it in a way that's going to be interesting to people. So the cadence has to work. And so when I was designing this book, actually, I had to make, you know, sweet images next to exciting images, so, like, you know, that one's really exciting and it's like, you know, yeah, and then, you know, there's an exciting image super, and then, you know, sweet image. And so, like, I'm looking for opportunities to go from cute and cuddly to super exciting and then back down to, you know, something sweet. And if you go back and forth between those concepts than you keep people turning the page, but if you keep doing the same thing over and over, like the golf course books, then you know, all of a sudden it's a very boring experience, so remember to keep moving back and forth.