Table of Contents for

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC Book, Second Edition

The Book Module

In the Book module (Figure 9.1), you can create new book projects based on a current selection of images or a saved collection from the Collections panel on the left. The main content area lets you view a book layout as a multi-page view (Figure 9.1), as double-page spreads, or as a single-page view, including a close-up view. In the multi-page view, you get to see a complete overview of a book project and can adjust the zoom view via the Toolbar Thumbnails slider. Double-click a page or click on the spread or page-view buttons in the Toolbar to view these pages in closer detail. You can drag images to individual pages to change photos, click photos to adjust the zoom setting, or right-click to use the context menu to adjust how a photo fits or fills a photo cell and choose different page-layout options.

Creating a New Book

To create a book, you first need to select a collection of images. You can do this by selecting photos from the Collections panel via the Book module. To begin with, you will be in the multi-page layout view. The selected photos will appear in the Filmstrip, but the book layout will be empty. The best way to create a layout is to select a preset from the Auto Layout panel and click the Auto Layout button. This creates an instant book layout based on the preset settings. If you want to try an alternative auto layout, click the Clear Layout button, or click Clear Book in the Create bar (Figure 9.2), and click Auto Layout again. It is important to familiarize yourself with this procedure. If you exit the Book module, select another set of images, and revisit the Book module, the previous book layout (and selection of images) will still be active. At this point, you can do one of two things. You can click the Clear Layout button to clear the previous layout and Filmstrip selection, or you can click the Create Saved Book button in the Create bar. This opens the Create Book dialog shown in Figure 9.3 and lets you save the current layout work as a new Book collection. If you have selected a subset of the Filmstrip selection for use in the book, remember to check the “Include only used photos” option. Basically, you use the Clear Layout button each time you wish to start a new layout and the Create Saved Book button to save a new Book collection. If a photo you have included in a book layout is currently offline, you will see a red exclamation point badge in the top-left corner of the photo cell. You will also see a warning message if the combination of the layout preset option and number of images selected means a book will exceed the maximum 240 pages.

Book Settings Panel

The Book Settings panel options are shown in Figure 9.5. Here, you can choose from different types of Blurb book styles, such as Blurb Photo Book, Blurb Magazine, and Blurb Trade Book styles. The Magazine format can be used to create high-end magazines with a semi-gloss cover or velvet finish paper. Trade Books meanwhile, offer an affordable, alternative book format. Or, you can generate a PDF book layout, or create JPEG files. Next, you have the book format options, where you can select a Square, Portrait, or Landscape format in a small, standard, or large size. Not all combinations are possible, as these are dependent on the available Blurb layouts. For example, you can create a landscape book in a standard or large format, but you can create a portrait book in a standard format only. The initial content area preview gives you a rough idea of how your book might look depending on what you choose here. When creating a book, you also have the following cover options: a Hardcover Image Wrap, a Hardcover Dust Jacket, or a Softcover (Softcover is not available for the large books). If creating a PDF or JPEG output, you can choose the Hardcover Image Wrap, Hardcover Dust Jacket, or No Cover options.

PDF and JPEG Book Export

If PDF is selected as the output, you will see the Book Settings panel view (bottom of Figure 9.5), which allows you to export a Book project as a PDF document. The following settings are also the same if choosing to output as JPEG files. To start with, you have similar Size and Cover options. You can use the JPEG Quality slider to determine how much compression should be used. Obviously, a lower-quality setting generates a more compact PDF document at the expense of image quality. The Color Profile can be set to sRGB, Display P3, Adobe RGB, or ProPhoto RGB. sRGB is the safest choice to make here if you want the PDF to be compatible with other printers. If you choose the Other option, you can select other RGB profiles, such as custom printer profiles. The Sharpening controls are the same as those used in the Print module, letting you apply a low, standard, or high sharpening for glossy or matte media type. Strictly speaking, these are intended for preparing images for inkjet output rather than halftone reproduction on an Indigo press. Even so, it is better to apply this type of sharpening than no sharpening at all. Incidentally, sharpening is applied by default when you output via the Blurb panel. In these instances, the sharpening always uses the Standard setting. The PDF option can also be used to produce PDF books that will look good when presented on a tablet device such as an iPad. For this type of output, you will probably want to keep the sharpening switched off.

Preview Panel

The Preview panel (Figure 9.6) shows a preview of the page or pages you are currently working on. There are three view options. Fit lets you see a double-page spread view, 1:1 shows a single-page view, and 4:1 shows a magnified view suited for close-up inspection of text. When using the 1:1 or 4:1 views, you can drag the rectangle that appears in the Preview area to scroll the page.

Toolbar

The Toolbar (Figure 9.7) offers some of the same Book view options as the Preview panel, allowing you to switch from a multi-page layout () to a spread layout view () or a single-page view (). In the multi-page view mode, you can use the Thumbnails slider to make the multi-page view bigger or smaller. Note that if you click in the page count display in the center, you can type in a page number to select. In the spread or single-page view, you can click the page arrow buttons to navigate from one spread (or page) to the next.

Auto Layout Panel

With any new project, you are going to be confronted with the dreaded “blank page” scenario. When designing a book, it can help if you have some elementary design skills, but with so many layout options to choose from, it is easy to get overwhelmed with so much choice. But if you click the Auto Layout button in the Auto Layout panel (Figure 9.8) at the beginning of a project, Lightroom will automatically generate a complete book layout for you based on the current Auto Layout preset setting. But read the following section first before you try this.

Auto Layout Preset Editor

For the Auto Layout button to work, you either need to select a Fixed Layout preset or, if Random From Favorites is selected, have first added a few layouts as favorites for each type of page layout, such as 1 Photo, 2 Photos, or 3 Photos. To find out how to add favorites, see Figure 9.18 on page 524.

Editing the Book Pages

The auto-layout option can certainly help break the ice and get a book project started, but at some stage, you will almost certainly want to edit the pages and refine the layout. Figure 9.12 shows a multi-page layout view of a book project. As you can see, this gives you the ability to see an overview of a book and make some basic edits. For example, you can select individual pages by clicking them (or clicking just below a page) and drag the yellow bar to change the page order. If you hold down the key, you can click to add more pages to a selection. Use (Mac) or (PC) to select all of the pages in a layout and (Mac) or (PC) to select all pages including the cover. You can also click photo cells or text cells to edit them. So, for example, you can drag photos from one photo cell to another and swap their positions. If you drag a photo from the Filmstrip to a photo cell, you can remove a photo that is there and replace it with the one you have just dragged. Figure 9.11 shows a close-up view of a Filmstrip cell viewed in the Book module. The count number at the top indicates how many times this photo has been used in a book project (such as once on the cover and once inside the book). If you use the context menu (right-click a cell), you can remove a photo and leave the cell blank. When you click a photo cell, you will see the Zoom slider for reducing or increasing the zoom setting.

Editing the Cover Pages

The front and back cover pages are displayed at the top of the multi-page layout view, and have separate template options. Of these, the one highlighted in Figure 9.15 is quite interesting, as it allows you to place multiple images from the book in the cover design. This layout is shown in use in Figure 9.16, which also illustrates how you can drag a selection of photos from the Filmstrip to auto-populate the squares. Once photos have been added to a layout, you can rearrange them by dragging from one cell to another (Figure 9.17). Other layout options allow you to place full-bleed images on both the front and back cover pages with overlaid text. Lightroom makes use of the first image in the collection as the front cover image and the last image in the collection as the back cover image. To add text to the spine, click in the spine text box and text will be applied rotated 90 degrees. Depending on how you set the size of the type, you may need to adjust the baseline shift so the spine text appears centered across the width of the spine. Discussed later are ways you can set the text in the text cells and, in particular, how you can maintain control over the justification and cell padding, as well as how to precisely place the text on the cover pages.

Page Panel

Figure 9.18 shows the Page panel with a four-photo page layout. You can click the Add Page button to add a new page using whatever page template is currently shown in the Page panel preview. Or, you can click the Add Blank button to add blank pages. If you click anywhere in the middle section, this opens the page layout picker shown in Figure 9.19, where you have multiple options to select from different layout groupings, such as 1 Photo, 2 Photos, or custom design layouts, such as Portfolio or Wedding.

Marking Page Layouts as Favorites

Favorite page layouts are used when generating an auto layout. To mark layouts as favorites, go to the page layout picker (Figure 9.19). As you move the pointer over the layouts, you can click in a layout’s hollow circle to add it as a favorite (indicated by a filled circle). Or, you can right-click a layout to choose Add Layout to Favorites to mark it as a favorite (see Figure 9.18). To remove a layout from the Favorites list, right-click again or click inside the filled circle.

Saving Custom Page Layouts

It is possible to edit the preset page layouts to create a custom page layout setting. For example, if you use the cell padding sliders to adjust the layout of a page preset layout, you can modify an existing layout to create a custom layout of your own. Having done that, right-click the modified page layout in the content area to access the context menu shown in Figure 9.20 and select Save as Custom Page. This then adds the modified page layout as a new User Page setting (Figure 9.21), which will also appear listed in the Page panel Layout menu. Photo text settings are also included when you save custom page layouts.

Guides Panel

The Book module has a Guides panel (Figure 9.22). Here, you have the option of showing/hiding various guides ( [Mac] or [PC]). If you intend to publish photographs as full-bleed images, it is critical that you allow enough room for the page bleed. You have to bear in mind that when producing a printed book, it is never going to be possible for the final trimmed product to be aligned exactly the way it appears laid out on the computer. You may not notice this when you pick up a book, but there is a margin of error of around a millimeter or so between all the pages after they have been trimmed. Therefore, it is customary to allow a bleed area of around 3 mm outside the specified page area when placing page elements that are intended to overflow the page edge. You can see these when enabling Page Bleed guides ( [Mac] or [PC]). Similarly, it is not a good idea to create a page layout in which graphics or text are placed too close to the edge of the page, which is why most books have quite generous margins. In the case of the Book module, the Text Safe Area is defined by the thin yellow lines and can be shown or hidden using (Mac) or (PC). The golden rule is to keep safely within these margins or, if you want to print full page, make sure the images fill to the page-bleed edges. Next is the Photo Cells option, which allows you to turn their visibility on or off ( [Mac] or [PC]).

Cell Panel

The Cell panel can be used to pad the position of a photo within a photo frame or text within a text frame and thereby fine-tune the placement of images and text within a layout. The default mode for the Cell panel is a compact view with a single padding slider. Click the arrow (circled) to access the expanded view shown in Figure 9.23. In this view mode, you can individually adjust the sliders to alter the padding within a frame and click the lock buttons to lock one or more sliders. Or, click the Link All button at the bottom to lock all sliders.

Customizing Page Layout Cells

You can refine the layout with custom-sized cells within a page layout. These can be any size you want and not restricted by the standard padding. You can add multiple cells to a page layout, move them to the front or back and place a cell exactly where you want it. When you have finished editing a layout you can save this as a custom page layout setting.

Text Panel

The Text panel (Figure 9.24) can be used to add text to individual photos or page layouts. When you view a new page layout in a single-page or spread view, you will see an Add Page Text box overlay at the bottom of each page. When you click on it, the text box becomes active, the words “Page Text” are highlighted, and the Page Text options are enabled in the Text panel. You can now start typing to overwrite the current text and add a page caption to that particular page. The buttons at the bottom of the panel can be used to anchor the page text to the top or bottom of the page layout. While the page text box is active, you can click the yellow border to manually offset the text box or you can drag the Offset slider in the Text panel.

Text Box Layouts

Some page layouts include text boxes for placing text and are there to help you maintain continuity in a layout design when adding text (Figure 9.26). These are represented in a page layout by a thin-line, rectangular guide outline. To enter custom text, click inside a box and start typing. If the Filler Text option is checked in the Guides panel (Figure 9.22), you will initially see filler text appear in these text boxes. This disappears as soon as you click in the text box.

Adding Auto Text

You can auto-add text within the page layout text boxes. To do this, right-click to access the context menu and select one of the options from the Auto Text menu shown in Figure 9.28. By default, this is set to Custom (which overrides the auto-text option). Any text that you have already entered will remain in the text box and not be edited. If you select the Title, Caption, or File Name option, Lightroom reads and adds the data that may have been entered in these metadata fields and auto-fills the text box accordingly. If multiple type styles have been applied to the text in a particular text cell, when Auto Text is applied it utilizes the first character in the box to format the rest of the text. A useful tip is to make sure you fill out the Title and Caption fields via the Library module. You can then use these metadata entries to populate the text cells using the Auto Text feature. You can then easily reformat the page layout and have the text boxes preserve the pre-selected auto content. Likewise, this means Lightroom can access the Title or Caption data if you place the same images in another book creation.

Type Panel

In any book design project, it is important to have full control of the text. The Book module has a number of type controls in the Type panel (Figure 9.29). These utilize the same Adobe type engine used in other Adobe products. The Book module may not offer all the type features that can be found in Adobe Illustrator or Adobe InDesign, but there is enough here to help you produce decent-looking text in a book. At the top of the panel is the Text Style Preset menu, where you can select text presets. The title – sans serif and caption – sans serif text style presets use Myriad Pro. This is a modern sans-serif font and offers a nice wide range of styles from Condensed to Black, while the caption – serif and title – serif styles use the Adobe Garamond Pro serif typeface. As you start editing the character settings in the section below, you can choose Save Current Settings as New Preset. This opens the save dialog shown in Figure 9.30, which lets you add the character settings as a new text style.

Type Panel Character Controls

When setting the type, you will want to have quick access to all the available fonts and associated type options. In the Type panel, click the disclosure triangle (circled in Figure 9.29) to reveal the full list of options. Here, you can set the character color, size, and opacity. It helps to have some understanding of working with fonts. If you are unsure, try making a test print with your desktop printer at 100% to see how the text settings actually look when printed. With the various book projects I have worked on, I have used a font size of between 7 points and 10.7 points for the captions and body text. For example, the body text in this book uses an 8.5-point typeface. You will probably want to experiment with different font sizes, and it is possible to end up with a mixture of font sizes in a final layout. As a rule, designers prefer to use a serif typeface for body text (serif text is characterized by semistructural details at the ends of the font strokes). Examples of this are Times New Roman and Garamond. This is because it is argued that serif text is easier to read. For headings, bolder sans-serif typefaces are commonly used, such as Gill Sans or Arial. But rules are made to be broken. The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC Book uses Gotham Book for the headings and Frutiger Light (a sans-serif typeface) for the body text.

Target Adjustment Tool Options

The Type panel also features a Target Adjustment tool (circled), which, when selected, can be used to directly modify type. Drag horizontally over a selection to adjust the size, and drag vertically to adjust the leading. If you hold down the (Mac) or (PC) key and drag horizontally, you can adjust the tracking. If you hold down the (Mac) or (PC) key and drag vertically, you can adjust the baseline shift. If you drag horizontally over the cursor insertion point, you adjust the kerning. Also, -dragging temporarily deactivates the Target Adjustment tool, which allows you to alter your text selection before releasing the key and modifying the type settings again. Finally, you can use the key to exit the Target Adjustment mode.

Type Panel Frame Controls

The Frame buttons (at the bottom of Figure 9.32) can be used to control how text is placed within the text cells. From left to right, you can choose to align text to the left, center, right, or with full justification. The next three buttons allow you to also align the text to the top, middle, or bottom of the cell. You can then use the Cell panel (which is shown again in Figure 9.33) to pad the text, adjusting the sliders to pad the left, right, top, and bottom edges. As I mentioned earlier, when you click the boxes next to each of these sliders, you can link the individual padding settings. Or, you can click the Link All button at the bottom to link all the sliders together.

Background Panel

Most people will want to have their photos printed against a paper-white background. But if you wish, you can use the Background panel (Figure 9.34) to edit the background and choose another color instead. For example, I have had a Blurb book printed using black as the background color, which, in my opinion, printed really well. The Apply Globally option is checked by default, so whatever settings you choose to apply here will be applied to all the inside pages. If you deselect this option, you will have the option to apply custom background settings to individual pages. If you click the Graphic option, you can also add a graphic image that fills the entire page bleed areas. To do this, you have to select an image from the Filmstrip and drag this up to the Background graphic preview area. You can then adjust the Opacity slider to set the opacity. If you click the downward arrow (circled), you can access the custom graphic backgrounds shown in Figure 9.35. You can also combine the Graphic and Background Color settings to achieve the desired mix of background image and color shade.

Publishing Your Book

Once your book project is complete, you are all ready to publish, which you can do by clicking the Send Book to Blurb button at the bottom. This opens the first of the two dialogs shown in Figure 9.36. First, you need to log in as a new member or enter your existing login information. Next, you will be asked to give the book a title, a subtitle, and an author name. These are not required, but they will help you identify individual book projects when visiting the Blurb store. The remaining dialogs take you through the pricing options, where you can choose to order multiple books to gain a discount or enter promo codes. Although you are shown a price for getting the book printed, this does not include the delivery cost. Delivery times vary depending on which territory you live in and where your nearest Blurb printing center is located.

Pause and Resume the Upload of a Book to Blurb

During the initial phase, you will have to wait while the rendering of book content to PDF is going on. This may take a while depending on the size of your book. As Lightroom starts to upload the PDF file, you can then pause and resume the upload of the pages to Blurb. To do this, go to the Activity and Status area at the upper-left corner of the window (next to the Lightroom icon). Here, you can pause and resume the upload of the pages to Blurb via the expanded progress bar.

The Slideshow Module

The Slideshow module (Figure 9.37) can be used to create onscreen presentations that can be played directly via the Slideshow module.

The Slide Editor View

Figure 9.38 shows the Slide Editor view, which always displays the most selected Filmstrip image. You can change the image view by using the Left and Right Arrow keys to navigate through the selected images in the Filmstrip. As adjustments are made to the Slideshow settings in the panels on the right, these changes are reflected in the Slide Editor view. The Toolbar has preview playback controls and options for choosing which photos are displayed in a slideshow. You can choose from All Filmstrip Photos, Selected Photos, or Flagged Photos. As with other Lightroom modules, you can toggle showing and hiding the Toolbar using the keyboard shortcut.

Layout Panel

The Layout panel lets you edit the slide layout by specifying the margins for the image display. In Figure 9.39, the layout guides are highlighted in red. You can adjust the margins by dragging the slider controls. Or, you can double-click the panel boxes, enter a pixel value, and fine-tune this setting using the Up and Down Arrow keys. A single Arrow key press increases or decreases the pixel dimensions by 1 unit, and pressing and an Arrow key increases or decreases the pixel dimensions 10 units at a time. You can also drag on the guides directly within the content area to adjust the margin widths. The unit dimensions have linking check boxes next to them. This means that when two or more boxes are checked, as you adjust one value, the other field values are linked. For example, in Figure 9.39, I checked the boxes for the left and right margins only. This meant that as I adjusted the width for the right margin, the left margin was adjusted by the same amount. You can hide the slide layout guides at any time by unchecking the Show Guides box in the Layout panel or by using the (Mac) or (PC) shortcut. In the Aspect Preview menu, you can select Screen to make the aspect ratio of the Slideshow match the proportions of the computer display you are working on, or you can select a fixed ratio of 16:9 or 4:3. This is something you want to consider early on, especially if you plan to export a slideshow to play on a different screen.

Options Panel

Now let’s look at how the photographs are displayed within the slide frames. At the top of the Options panel (Figure 9.40) is the Zoom to Fill Frame check box. In the Figure 9.42 example, this was unchecked, and as you can see in the Slide Editor view, the image was centered within the margins (as specified in the Layout panel). If the Zoom to Fill Frame option is checked (Figure 9.43), the photo resizes and expands to fill the available space. You should be aware that when you select this option, it automatically centers each image in the slideshow as it applies the necessary cropping to the picture. In Figure 9.43, you will notice that the cropped view is aligned more toward the top of the frame. This is because I clicked on the slide preview image and dragged it downward to preserve more of the top of the photo. This tweaking overrides the automatic cropping and is applied on a per-image basis. In other words, you can pre-edit a selection of pictures that are to be included in a slideshow and customize the cropping for each image. Just be aware that these adjustments are lost as soon as you make a new selection of images. If you end up spending time making custom tweaks to a slideshow presentation, you will definitely want to save these adjustments as a Slideshow collection. In these two examples, I also checked the Stroke Border option to add a light-gray stroke to the slideshow frame images (use the Stroke Border slider to adjust the thickness). If you want to change the stroke color, double-click the color swatch to open the color picker dialog shown in Figure 9.41.

Overlays Panel

Having established the layout margins and image placement, you can begin adding content to the slide frames. If you enable the Identity Plate option, you can select a custom preset template by clicking the identity plate preview, and choosing Edit from the drop-down menu to create a new one. The Opacity and Scale properties let you customize the identity plate appearance and decide whether you want the identity plate to be on top or placed behind each slide image. Once enabled, the identity plate can be repositioned by simply clicking and dragging anywhere inside the slide frame area. In this respect, the identity plate is just like any other custom object. The Watermarking option allows you to select a custom watermark setting such as was discussed in Chapter 7 (see pages 459 to 460). The Rating Stars options let you display the current image star rating, as well as adjust the color and scale size. As with all custom objects, you can scale each object by dragging a corner or side handle. The Text Overlays check box toggles displaying all other text objects apart from the identity plate and ratings. For example, in Figure 9.44, this option is checked, which allows you to see a filename text object that I had placed centered below the image. The Shadow check box can be used to apply a drop shadow effect to each overlay object and apply independent shadow settings to each.

Creating a Custom Identity Plate

I will discuss working with text overlays shortly, but let’s take a quick look at the Identity Plate options first (Figures 9.45 and 9.46). To open the Identity Plate Editor, click the identity plate preview in the Overlays panel and choose a pre-saved Identity Plate setting, or select Edit.

Adding Custom Text Overlays

To add a custom text overlay, click the Add Text to Slide button (Figure 9.47). This opens a text box next to it in the Toolbar, where you can type to add custom text. Click , and the text appears as a new text overlay in the Slide Editor view. You can add as many text overlays as you like and re-edit them. To hide a Custom Text box, click the Add Text to Slide button a second time. You can also use the Rotate buttons on the Toolbar to rotate text overlays by 90 degrees and to remove a text overlay; just click to highlight it and press . If you click to select a text object in the Slide Editor view, you can edit the content by typing in the Toolbar text field. Or, you can click on the Text Overlays menu (circled) to reveal the options shown in Figure 9.48 and select an item from the list such as Date or Filename. Choosing Edit opens the Text Template Editor (Figure 9.48). This lets you add various metadata items as tokens. Just click an Insert button to add new tokens to a template design, and combine these with custom text to create your own custom text overlay presets. In Figure 9.49, I show how you could create text overlays using different tokens, such as Date (Month, DD, YYYY).

Backdrop Panel

The Slideshow frame appearance can be modified via the Backdrop panel. With the Color Wash controls, you can set up different color scheme combinations using the Color Wash and Background Color swatches, as well as adjust the Opacity and Angle sliders to fine-tune the effect. You can also place an image as a backdrop. The first time you check the Background Image option, you will not see anything happen, because you have to select a photograph from the Filmstrip first and drag it into the backdrop area (or Background image preview) for the background image to register. After that, you can use the check box to toggle the backdrop image on or off. The Color Wash colors can be combined with the applied backdrop image and used to mute the backdrop image contrast. Whenever an image is applied to the backdrop, you still retain full control over the Color Wash Color, Background Color, and Color Wash settings, and you can mix them any way you like to achieve the desired look for the backdrop. Remember also that all the settings, including those in the Backdrop panel, can be saved as a template. So, you can create Backdrop panel designs that use different background images and save them to the Template Browser panel. The following steps show how I went about creating a custom backdrop design for a slideshow.

Titles Panel

The Titles panel can be used to add intro and ending screens to a slideshow presentation. You can add these using the Identity Plate Editor, as shown below. You simply select the Add Identity Plate options to add a screen at the beginning and/or end. The Titles panel also has a few extra controls so you can scale the identity plate and override the text color, as well as set the background color for the intro and ending screens.

Music Panel

Music soundtracks can be added to a slideshow via the Music panel shown in Figure 9.50, which allows you to select soundtrack audio files to add to a slideshow presentation. To add these, click the + button. On the computer setup in my office, I maintain a complete MP3 music library and use the system Finder (Figure 9.51) to select the music I wish to have played in the background. You can add multiple audio tracks; the track duration appears alongside each soundtrack name. To remove a soundtrack from the Music panel, click the – button. If a music track you have selected later appears to be missing, you will see a warning icon in the Music panel that alerts you to relink.

Playback Panel

The Playback panel can be used to configure the slideshow playback settings. There are two modes for this panel. Figure 9.52 shows the Automatic mode, which gives you manual control over the playback attributes.

Pan and Zoom Options

When the Pan and Zoom option is checked, this enables automatic pan and zoom style transitions between slides, applying a Ken Burns–style effect to the slideshow images. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, Ken Burns is a documentary film director and producer (The Vietnam War TV series) credited with incorporating pans and zooms of stills images in order to bring more life to static pictures. It is a style that is much used these days for slideshow and movie presentations and most notably featured in Apple video-editing applications. To apply this type of effect to your slideshows, enable the Pan and Zoom option and adjust the Pan and Zoom slider. A Low setting will result in gentle pans and zooms, while a High setting will result in more sweeping movements. After adjusting the Zoom Ratio setting, click the Preview button to check out the result.

Manual Mode

Clicking the Manual button switches the Playback panel to Manual mode, as shown in Figure 9.53. This disables and hides the music sync, the slide length, crossfade controls, and Fit to Music button, as well as the audio balance and Pan and Zoom options.

Playback Screen and Quality Settings

The Playback screen section displays a representation of connected computer displays. All the Playback panels shown here were captured with Lightroom running on a computer with two displays. The big arrow indicates which display the slideshow will appear on when in Play mode, and in such instances, you can click either display. Check the “Blank other screens” option to blank out the other display during Play mode.

Play and Preview

You will now be ready to play the slideshow. To do this, choose Slideshow Run Slideshow or click the Play button in the bottom-right corner (circled in Figure 9.54). Or, you can press to launch a full-screen slideshow using the currently selected slideshow template settings. When you switch to full Play mode, the display fades to black and then fades up to show the slides in sequence. You can pause a slideshow by clicking the Pause button or by pressing the . To stop a slideshow, just press the key. If you just want to see a quick preview of a slideshow, click the Preview button next to the Play button (). This allows you to preview a slideshow within the content area using the current quality settings. While you are in Preview mode, you can interact with the slideshow using the navigation keys located on the Toolbar (Figure 9.55).

Navigating Slideshow Photos

You can manually override a slideshow sequence by using the Left and Right Arrow keys to go backward or forward through the sequence. Use the to pause a slideshow, and press the again to resume playing.

Impromptu Slideshows

If you want to run an impromptu slideshow in any of Lightroom’s modules, press (Mac) or (PC). Press to then cancel or exit a slideshow.

Slideshows and Selections

There are Slideshow module options in the Toolbar (Figure 9.56), as well as in the Play Content submenu (Figure 9.57). These determine which images are accessed from the Filmstrip when playing a slideshow (providing more than one image is selected). If All Filmstrip Photos is selected, the slideshow plays all the photos in the current Filmstrip starting from the most selected image or the target image. If Selected Photos is selected, the Slideshow module plays only the selected images, and if Flagged Photos is selected, only those photos that have been rated as flagged images will be played.

Template Browser Panel

After you have gone to all the trouble of designing a slideshow layout with measured margins, identity plate, customized text objects, and backdrop image, it makes sense to save it as a template that can be used again later. To do this, click the + button in the Template Browser panel header and give the template a descriptive name. Figure 9.58 shows a template that I created on some of the earlier pages of this chapter and saved as Custom layout-3. As you roll over the other template presets in the list, you will see a preview based on whichever is the most selected image in the Slide Editor view. As with the other Lightroom modules, you can remove a template by highlighting it and clicking the – button in the Template Browser panel. You can also update the settings for a particular template by right-clicking and choosing Update with Current Settings. There is no nesting capability built into the Template Browser panel, although to be honest it is not something that you are likely to need, because there should be enough room to accommodate all the slideshow templates you might use. You can see how social and wedding photographers might find it useful to take a standard layout design and save variations of this template with alternative music playback settings to suit the music tastes of different clients, and how art photographers might like to create custom slideshows for exhibition displays on a large screen.

Creating a Slideshow Collection

Once you have completed work on a specific Slideshow presentation, you can choose Slideshow Create Saved Slideshow, use (Mac) or (PC), or click the + button circled in the Collections panel to save the current slideshow settings and collection of photos as a Slideshow collection. In the Create Slideshow dialog, name the collection and click Create to save (Figure 9.59).

Exporting a Slideshow

In addition to displaying slideshows, you can also export them. For example, you can export a self-contained slideshow in the Adobe PDF format, which can be played via the freely available Adobe Acrobat Reader DC program or any other program capable of reading PDF files (such as Apple Preview). Or, you can export individual JPEG slides that can be placed as pages in presentation programs such as Microsoft Powerpoint or Apple Keynote. The Export buttons are positioned at the bottom left of the screen and are shown in Figure 9.60. Normally, you will see two options—Export to PDF and Export to Video—but if you hold down the key, the Export to PDF button will change to Export to JPEG, which completes the three export options available in Lightroom. (You can also access these via the Slideshow menu or use the keyboard shortcuts mentioned in the following sections.)

Exporting Slideshows to PDF

To export a PDF slideshow, choose Slideshow Export PDF Slideshow, or use (Mac) or (PC). Figure 9.61 shows the Export Slideshow to PDF dialog, where you can name and choose a destination to save the exported PDF to. Below this, you have the PDF export options, such as the Quality slider (to set the amount of compression used) and the Width and Height sections (to determine how large the slideshow document will be). You need to take into account the likely computer display size that the exported slideshow will be played on. For example, most computers will have an LCD display that uses a wide-screen format ratio—something like 16:9. If you want to scale down the slide size but preserve the full slide area, the size dimensions must match the ratio of the current pixel width and pixel height of your display. However, to make life easier for you, the Common Sizes menu will be set to the current monitor display resolution (actually the format of the slideshow slides will have already been influenced by the computer display you are working with). If you click this menu, you can easily select a common monitor resolution size for other typical computer screens. The “Automatically show full screen” option determines whether the slideshow starts playing in full-screen mode when the person who receives the slideshow opens the exported slideshow PDF document on his or her computer.

Exporting Slideshows to JPEG

To export a slideshow to JPEG files, choose Slideshow Export JPEG Slideshow, or use (Mac) or (PC). This opens the Export Slideshow to JPEGs dialog shown in Figure 9.62, where again, you can select the desired compression and screen size settings. This option is mainly useful if you wish to prepare individual JPEG slides that can then be incorporated into, say, a Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote presentation.

Exporting Slideshows to Video

The Export Video feature can be used to export high-quality movie slideshows (Figure 9.63). By utilizing the H.264 movie format, you can generate movie files that can be uploaded to any of the popular video-sharing websites such as YouTube. You can also optimize video files to be played back on mobile media devices such as the iPhone. Lightroom Classic CC has recently upgraded the framework used for the video rendering, which should result in faster processing times.

Exporting a Timelapse Video

Figure 9.64 shows an example of a time-lapse movie that was made directly from Lightroom. This was created by making a sequence of photos shot once every 6 seconds and making them into a slideshow. To create this, I used a custom 29.97 fps time-lapse Slideshow template that was created by Sean McCormack. This Slideshow template is available for download via the Lightroom Blog website (tinyurl.com/qedzggv).

Licensing Audio Tracks

If your video export is to include an audio soundtrack, this does raise the question of whether it is legitimate to do so, because one of the big problems facing the music industry has been the illegal sharing of music downloads. If you produce a slideshow movie that includes original, unlicensed music, you cannot expect to export such a movie and publish it to a wider audience. For example, if you purchase an iTunes Plus track, this does not allow you to redistribute it if it is used in a slideshow movie. In any case, websites such as YouTube will notify you of copyright infringements if an uploaded file contains unlicensed music. So, if you plan to create a slideshow movie, make sure you have acquired the rights where necessary to use the soundtrack material. There are websites where you can purchase music for this type of usage, such as Getty’s audio division at pumpaudio.com. CreativeCommons.Org is another source of music for slideshows and videos. Another solution is to check out websites or social networking pages for unsigned music artists and see if you can strike up some kind of reciprocal deal. Sometimes a band might be interested in letting you use their music if you let them use your edited movie. The musician Moby licenses some of his B sides and other unreleased material for free for non-commercial film usage. Check out mobygratis.com to check out the conditions for use and how to sign up.