A Few Lightroom Tips

It's no secret that I love Lightroom. Organizing my photos in Lightroom has literally changed my life - and I have to thank Kayla and her wonderful Finding Your Photo Flow class for turning me into a Lightroom convert. Thank you Kayla!

I'm getting pretty good and fast at using Lightroom on a daily basis to organize, edit, and print my photos. Each time I work with the program, I learn a little something extra to speed up my workflow.

One of the best tips I learned was from Kayla - it's a little feature called Auto-Advance. It's the way to make your workflow speed up to lightning-fast. Seriously.

As you go through purging and rating your photos, this setting will automatically advance you to the next photo. Sounds like a little thing, but it makes all the difference in the world as you're using those hotkeys to move through your photos. Kayla explains it all here and if you use Lightroom, you need to turn on this feature right now. You can thank me later.

Another thing making me very happy with Lightroom is the print template feature. I love creating and printing my own photo collages. To me, it's so much faster than working with clipping templates in Photoshop - and I end up with a single print with lots of photos that I printed at home. Plus all the settings for editing and printing are right there to adjust, which (in my mind) seems easier than the way you have to do it in Photoshop.

The one frustration I was having was adjusting the crop of my photos just right before placing it in the print template. I was never quite sure how to crop it before I went over to the Print panel, and then was frustrated when it didn't look quite like I wanted it to. So I'd re-crop my photo, then re-insert it into the print template. It was a cycle that quickly got old.

I need to adjust the crop on that middle photo..

I finally had an ah-ha moment when I realized Lightroom automatically re-loads your re-adjusted photo for you. (I'll insert a "Duh" here for myself.)

So you can re-crop your photo after you place it in your print template by going back to the Develop panel and adjusting the crop.

Adjusting the crop in the Develop panel

And voila... when you go back to the Print panel, your photo will be re-loaded with the new crop.

Lightroom has re-loaded the photo with the new crop

Love that I finally noticed this. (Don't love how long it took me to see it.) It's super helpful when you aren't sure what size you're going to want to print the photo until you see how it looks in your print template.

So, all in all, Lightroom is the best. I'm still working in Lightroom 3, which is fine for me - but I'm hoping to upgrade to version 4 soon. I hear it has a lot more features in the Print module, which sounds exciting to me.

Do you have a Lightroom tip to share? I'd love to hear it...

Lightroom 3 Print Templates

I love photo collages. I've become a little bit obsessed lately with creating and printing photo collages out at home to use on my paper scrapbooking layouts. I've been inspired by the very talented Nichol Magouirk and her collage layouts. You have to check out this one and this one and this one - and do a search for a few more on her site because they are incredible. Kerri Bradford creates the most awesome photo collage templates for Photoshop that Nichol uses a lot for her layouts.

My own take on photo collage layouts - not nearly as fancy as Nichol's but I love them anyway:

    

I created these photo collages in Photoshop, but I knew it could be done a little quicker in Lightroom - so I started playing around with these and am hooked! Lightroom photo collages are easier because you just create a collection of your edited/cropped photos, then drag-and-drop them into the collage template. Once you get started, it's easy to make a collage to suit your needs.

I learned most of what I know from DigiScrap 101. Kayla Lamoreaux has awesome tutorials on her site about using Lightroom in general - and about using Lightroom to scrapbook and creating print templates too. I recommend starting there to see Kayla's awesome video tutorials - she also teaches an amazing class at JessicaSprague.com for Finding Your Photo Flow which has a ton of Lightroom information too. (And a special thanks to Leslie for pointing me in the right direction...)

So, back to the Lightroom print templates. I found these great Lightroom print templates from HalinaV and they got me started customizing my own templates. So, I've created a photo collage template for you as a free download. I'm just starting out with these, so if you have feedback about if / how it works for you, please let me know. This print template has been tested in Lightroom 3 and Lightroom 4.

To work with the template:

1. In Lightroom, go to the Print module.
2. Under Template Browser, right-click on User Templates and choose Import.
3. Browse to where you saved the template, choose the template, and click Import.

I like to organize EVERYTHING, so I created a folder for my templates under the Template Browser. To do this, before you import a new template, right click on User Templates and choose New Folder. Name your folder whatever you would like, then click Create. Now follow the steps above, choosing your new folder instead of User Templates - and your new templates will end up in your new folder. Easy-peasy.


Some tips when working with print templates:

1. Edit and - most importantly - crop your photos before you put them in the photo collage. There's not a ton of flexibility to adjust the size of your final photo once you put it in the collage without messing up the whole collage.
2. Don't worry about the black line around the photos you see in Lightroom. When you print or export the collage, it's not there.
3. Photo Borders: 
1. You can adjust the width of the borders to suit your needs - just go to Image Settings in the right-side panel and look under Image Settings. Under Photo Border, adjust the slider or type in a size by clicking in the pt box. The color of the border will be the same as your Page Background color.
2. If you want to change the color of the border to make it different from your Page Background, uncheck the Photo Border and instead check the Inner Stroke box. You can then click in the color bar and choose a different color. You can even layer these with a Photo Border for a double-matted look.
3. If you prefer, you can turn the borders off altogether. Just uncheck the Photo Border and Inner Stroke boxes.
4. You might want to change the collage to go landscape instead of portrait, or vice versa. To do so, click Page Setup at the bottom of the left-side panel. Under Orientation, choose Portrait or Landscape, then click OK.

When you're ready to print your collage, you can print directly to your printer or print to file.

1. On the right-side panel under Print Job, choose Print to. You can choose Printer or JPEG File. Each gives you different options.
2. If you choose Print to: Printer, you can set your Print Resolution, Print Sharpening, and Media Type. For my settings:
1. Print Resolution: 300 ppi
2. Print Sharpening: Standard
3. Media Type: Glossy or Matte depending on the paper I'm using.
4. Then click Print and set up your print settings for your printer as you would if you were printing a photo.
3. If you choose Print to: JPEG file, you can still set your Print Resolution and Print Sharpening. 
1. You can also set your JPEG Quality and Custom File Dimensions. 
2. The Custom File Dimensions allows you to set a larger canvas size, which is great if you're a digi-scrapper and creating a digital layout to work with in Photoshop.
3. To print, choose Print to File and choose a location to save your exported JPG. You can then print the photo collage or work with it in Photoshop to add text, paper, or embellishments.

I think that does it for today's lesson about Lightroom print templates. :) I'd love to see what you do with the template - and if this works, I'll be posting more as I create them...