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Showcasing Your Work: Slideshows and Books

Here we are with Lightroom Classic: The Complete Guide, another installment. If you think back to what we've done in the past, we've been workin' with Lightroom for quite some time. But the first week, we tried to make sure your mindset was set up for Lightroom so you knew exactly how Lightroom worked behind the scenes, you knew what a Lightroom catalog file was, you knew how the get your images into Lightroom and how to get 'em back out if you need to give 'em the somebody else. Week two, we concentrated on organizing our pictures and on adjusting them. So we learned about doing light retouching. We learned about refining our images with noise reduction and sharpening, all that kind of stuff. Week three, which is what we're in right now, on the first day we learned how to get Lightroom to help us to find the people that are in our photographs by educating it about what people's faces look like so then it can search our entire catalog to try to find similar faces. Therefore we could se...

arch for the people found in our photos without doing very much work. We could also view our images on a map. Then we looked at how the process HDR images, how to stitch panoramas, and how to convert our images to black and white. Then on the third day of the third week, we learned about organizing our keywords to give them structure. And once we gave them structure, they became much more powerful so that then when we got to the next day, we could start to be able to find our images very quickly. And the goal is to be able to find any memorable picture, any image that you can remember taking in your head, in five seconds or less. That's only possible, though, if you look through those lessons and follow what we did. That's means doing the homework, too. Well, today, what are we gonna do? Well, we're going to talk about showcasing your work. And we're gonna do that by showing you how to make a slideshow or print a book. So let's jump into Lightroom and get started. Here I have a series of images that I captured in Venice, Italy. And I'd like to present them to a friend by showing a slideshow. Well, there are many different ways of making slideshows in Lightroom. The main thing, though, if I wanna do it very quickly, is if I go to the Window menu and choose Impromptu Slideshow, I can do it as easy as typing this keyboard shortcut. That's Command and then the Return key. That would be Control and Return in Windows. That means anytime I'm viewing a series of images like this, I should be able to hold down the Command key and hit Return, and very quickly, it should be able to start showing a slideshow. Did you notice, though, in this slideshow, it didn't just start showing the images, it put up some text first. And then when it's showing the slideshow, you'll notice that there's a fadeout in between each one. And my photos don't go all the way out to the edge of the screen. Instead there's a little bit of space around them. And you might notice in the background, the upper right corner is a little bit brighter than the lower left corner. And that means I've really customized this slideshow. It could even have music related to it, if I'd like. Well, in order to be able to do a slideshow that easy, where you just do Command + Return, we need to go to an area in Lightroom where we define all the settings for slideshows. And so let's head there. So here I have my collection of images I'd like to turn into a slideshow. I'm gonna just click up here on the word Slideshow to switch to the Slideshow module. Then I usually start on the left side of my screen. Over on the left side is where I'll find an area called the Template Browser. And if you've never worked with slideshows before, you'll find that the only thing you have is this area called Lightroom Templates. And if that's all you have, these templates are not all that good. They're not all that special, I should say. You'll probably wanna customize them. But just look at the names of these. And if you hover them, you can get a preview of what each template would look like by glancing up here in this Preview area. So here, I don't want a caption and a rating below my image. I don't want it to crop to fill the frame, because that will crop into my pictures. If I have a square image but a horizontal screen, it's gonna have to crop into it to fill. I don't want to see any excess metadata. I just want Simple. And maybe Widescreen. So I switch between these two, and I see the only difference looks to be that one has a little bit of space around it, the other one completely fills. I'm gonna go for the one that has a little space around it, and I'm simply gonna click on it. Now, when I click on it, what's actually happening when I click on these templates is it's loading all the settings related to the template into the right side of my screen. Then I can fine-tune it. I start with a template so I don't have to start from scratch. And then I dial down into the specifics of that setting to fine-tune it. So before I do this, let me show you just a few of the templates that I have. These templates down here, you won't have in your copy of Lightroom, because these are ones I created myself. Here's ones with gradient backgrounds. Watch the preview that's here. You'll see one with a slightly blue background. It's really dark, though. Here's dark gray background, where the upper right corner's a little lighter. Here's dark green, light gray, and a red wash. Go down to the next set, here we have solid colors. And if I were to switch between those, you'd see that the background color changes. Go down to the next one, Textured Backgrounds. Well, with this, I could present it on a desert kind of texture if I wanted to, some stucco, orangish, pinkish, or just kind of generic warm background. Very easy for me to switch between them. Here's Watermarked, if I wanted to actually have a watermark appearing on my picture. It's hard to tell in the preview, because the watermark is just in the little corner of my image down there. So I can see it change as I hover over the different templates that are here, but I can't actually read what it says. That's why I had to name these to be able to recall it. Then here's some with logos and text. So if I choose this, here I'll actually click on this to load the setting for it. And now you can see that I can have a slideshow, and down at the bottom it has my name and the word photography. Or I have other ones. Here's one with a fancier name in it, where it's got a little camera icon. Or I can have it spelled out horizontally, where it's not stacked. But I've set up all those templates to make it easy for me to very quickly do a slideshow. So if that's the case, all I need to do once I create those templates is select the images I'd like for my slideshow, I head to the Slideshow module, and then over on the left side of my screen, just a quick click allows me to choose the template I want. Once I have it, at the lower right corner we have a Play button. And I can start my slideshow. But in order to be able to do that, we need to know all the settings involved with actually creating these templates. So let me pick out one of these I might want to start with. I'll just start with one of these Gradient Backgrounds. And we'll go with that Light Gray Wash. I'll click on it. And any time I click on a template, it's gonna load all the settings over here on the right side. So let's see what's available in that particular section. So first, here's Playback. And we can decide, do we want it to be Automatic, where every few seconds it puts a new slide up, or Manual? I'd usually use Manual if I'm going to be talking about the slides, like I'm giving this talk at a group. Then I'll be just talking about what's in the slide. And I don't know how long that's gonna take. So I'm gonna use the arrow keys to manually advance my slideshow. If I choose Manual, there's not very many options here. If I choose Automatic, on the other hand, here I can tell it the length of time that the slide will appear on my screen and how much time it takes to fade from one image to the next. Later on we'll learn how to add music to our slideshow. And if we were to do so, here's a choice called Fit to Music. What that would do is look at the length of the song or songs that I've chosen, and then it counts the number of slides we have in our slideshow, and it does very simple math to say, let's make this slideshow fill the length of that entire song so that the slideshow ends at the same time that the song ends. And therefore it would calculate both of these settings here, mainly the Slide Length, based on the length of the music. Then if you happen to have any videos in your slideshow here, it would say, well, should it mainly be the music that we hear? Or should we actually hear the sound from the video? What would be more important? If the sound in the video is not important at all, I could crank this up so it's mainly the music. There's a choice here called Pan and Zoom. And if I turn that on, then here we have how much we'd like it to move. And therefore it would be able to, instead of having a still photograph there, it would be able to zoom up on my images and pan around them as they're being shown to make it a little bit more dynamic. Turn that off. At the bottom, then it wants to know, when the slideshow is over, should it just start over again? Or should it only play once? So there's if it should repeat or not. And then we also have, do we want it in the original order that the images are being viewed in? Or would you rather have it mix it up and randomize them? Finally, at the bottom, we have the Quality of our slideshow. If we set it to High, it's gonna make it so it's got a preview that's the full size of our screen to display it from. And if we lower, it can more quickly display that slideshow. And if we choose Draft, you can probably use build-in previews, like our Smart Previews, without having to do any additional processing before the slideshow starts. So those are our Playback options. Then let's start looking at the choices that are up here to see how we can affect the visual look of our slideshow. Up here at the top, this choice called Zoom in to Fill Frame means, will my picture absolutely fill my screen? Or, if it's a square picture on a rectangular screen, should it have empty space on the sides? So here, if I choose Zoom to Fill Frame, it's gonna zoom up on this image so far that it'll fill the entire screen. And in this case, you see how much it crops into the image. I can't even that that guy is actually manning a gondola, or gan-dola, here. And so it's not very often that I use that particular choice. Because I find it ends up cropping my images in ways that I don't like. So I usually have that turned off. There's a choice below that called Stroke Border. And that can be useful if you have photographs that either have black out on the edge and you're showing them on a black background, and you wanna be able to show exactly where the photo ends, or you wanna have photos where, some of them, off on the edge, end with white, like a sky that's blown out to solid white. and behind it might be a white background. So it's hard to tell exactly where the photo ends and the background begins. Well, if that's the case, we have Stroke Border. And to the right of it, we have a little rectangle we can click on, and I can choose any color I want. If you want to choose a color out of your image, usually you can't just click on your picture. But we can still, I think, get colors out of it. If I click on that rectangle, just click in here first, and keep your mouse button held down. Then I can usually drag out here, and if I want, I can get something right out of my picture. Then we can close that. And here, we can simply control the size. For me, I rarely put strokes around my pictures. The only time I usually do it is if I set the stroke to white. And I bring it up quite high. I might do that to know it look like kind of old school, printed photographs. When we used the order a print, they'd never print all the way to the edge of the page. They'd leave that little gap. If I want that feeling, I can do so. All right, then let's go below that. We have this choice called Cast Shadow. That can help separate our image from whatever background we put it on. And we have pretty basic settings that are here. Opacity is how much you can see through that shadow. Offset is how far the shadow is away from the original. So if I offset it a lot, it'll be far away. And if I make it zero, it'll be directly underneath the photograph. The Radius is how soft the edge is. If I bring it high, we have a soft-edge shadow. Bring down, it'll be crisp. So you can fine-tune that. And then the Angle is what direction should it be away from the photograph. Should it be directly above, to the lower right, and so on. I usually make it go to the lower right. Because all the interfaces on all of our computer screens usually make that assumption, where it assumes the light source is from the upper left coming down. And that's where all the shadows are on most computer interfaces. And so if you're consistent with that, that's what your eye is used to seeing with computers. So anyway, there's how I can add a drop shadow. If you wanna see the difference, I'll turn it off. Back on again. Maybe make it a little bit darker. All right, let's collapse down that area and just look through what's left here, knowing that, in the end, we don't usually need to look at these choices. Because we're gonna create templates. So if I go into the area called Layout, here I can tell it how far should my image be inset from the edge of the slideshow. If I bring all of these sliders down to zero, then my image come out and touch the edge of the usable area of my slideshow. And if I bring these in, I can have it have space around it. Sometimes you want space around it because you're gonna end up showing some text along with the picture. Maybe it's just the filename because you're presenting this to a client, and you're trying to figure out which images they'd like you to use. Other times it'll be a caption that might tell you what's in the photograph. But if we don't have any gap between the photo and the edge, then we might not have much space for text. There is a checkbox down here, and it's not actually a checkbox, it's just but white, but it says Link All. If you turn that off, then you can adjust these individually. Because sometimes I'll end up increasing the setting at the bottom, because I wanna make room for my logo, which I'm going to eventually show down there at the bottom. In fact, we might as well leave a space like this in this particular case so that I can later on show you how to get your logo in there. Then there is a choice called Show Guides, and it simply shows you the results of these numbers by putting lines on your image to show that here's what your margins are actually defining. And therefore that's why your picture is taking up that much space. If you want to see other photographs, if you have more than one image currently, there are arrows in the lower left, and you can cycle through so you're not always staring at the same picture. And therefore you might find a horizontal image and see how it looks within that layout and switch between them. Down here we have a choice of aspect ratio, or Aspect Preview, I should say. And that means, should we preview it based on the shape of this screen that we happen to be using? That would be assuming that we're actually gonna show our slideshow on this particular screen. So if this was maybe my laptop screen, and that's what I planned on doing my slideshow on, yeah, I'd have it set to Screen. But I would set it here to 16: if I was gonna show this on a projector or on a television. Because HD TVs and projectors usually have an aspect ratio of 16:9. If I use that, then it may change the ratio of them, the shape of my slides. It all depends on what your computer screen is compared to that. The other choice that's here is 4:3. And if I remember correctly, that's old school television, back when we had tube TVs instead of the flat-screen variety. So you could use that if needed. Let's go to the next section. Down here we can put overlays on our image. And so I'm gonna go here and turn on a little checkbox. It's called Identity Plate. And with the Identity Plate, really, what an Identity Plate is primarily used for is this area in the upper left of my screen, where you see my name and some text, that's your identity plate. That's it default use. But we can use that in more than one area of Lightroom. Turning on this checkbox allows me to use it. And right here it shows me a preview of that Identity Plate. It defaults to whatever is being used in the upper left of your screen. But there's a little arrow in the lower right of that preview, and if you click, if you have more than one Identity Plate, you could choose it here. And so this is where I might choose one with my logo on it. And once I have that, I'll show you how to access those and make them in a moment, but once I have it, if I see it on my screen, I can click-and-drag to control where it's positioned. When you move it, you'll find a little anchor, this little square, that indicates where is it trying to stick to. Right now it's trying to stick to the lower left corner. And it's saying where should it be positioned compared to that lower left corner. Therefore, if I ever change the proportions, the Aspect Ratio setting, it would still be attached to that lower left corner. Whereas, if I put it here, it's gonna be attached relative to the bottom center. So I can do that. Then I can also have a setting here for Scale to control how big it is. And the Opacity, if I don't want you to be able to completely see it, I can kind of lessen it. If it is a text-based Identity Plate, you'll also have a choice here to override the color. Because in the upper left of your screen, this is always shown on a black background. But down here, I might not have it on a big background. So the color might not be appropriate that's in the original. To show you that, I'll switch back to, if I can find it, my default action, or, (chuckles) my action, my default Identity Plate. It's called Main Identity Plate. And you see how light that Lightroom Classic text is on this background. If I hit Override Color, though, now I can choose any color that I want. That only works, though, when we're using text. If you're using a graphic, it assumes that it could be a multicolored graphic. And so it's not gonna let you mess with the colors. But I liked it a little more when I had my little logo there. And I just might want to scale it down a little. Then there is another choice here called Render Behind Image. And if you were to choose that and then you repositioned this in some way that it actually went under the photo, it would be under the photograph. Whereas, if that was turned, it will be on top. And therefore you could have it sitting right in your picture if you wanted to, wherever you want. Now, if you want to create a new Identity Plate because you never thought of it when you were creating the one that appears in the upper left of your screen, but it might be used here, well, in that same area where I switched Identity Plates by clicking on the little arrow that's found in the lower right corner of the preview, there's a choice here called Edit. If you choose Edit, this is where you can create an Identity Plate. You either choose one based on text, and you just type in your text here and your styling, or you create a graphic one. And right here is a button called Locate File. If you click on that, you can choose any, I think it's JPEG or PNG file to use for this. We cover this in more detail in a different lesson. I believe it was the lesson on exporting. So if you see a lesson that mentions exporting, it will show you how to make Identity Plates. And in fact, that lesson showed you how to make watermarks, which is another thing we're gonna show you here. The Identity Plate was actually in the episode about customizing Lightroom, now that I recall that. All right, so we have that. Let's go down to the next section here, which is Watermarking. If I wanna put a mark that appears on top of my picture, I can turn on Watermark. And right here, you can select a template. And it was in that lesson that was about exporting your images. And when we made an export preset, I also showed you how to make these watermarks. So here, I'm gonna choose one of these. Let me just look at what I have. I'll choose the lower left. Or upper left will be a little easier to see. There, do you see my little watermark? So you can use any of your watermarking presets that you've created that you might usually use when you're exporting images. You can use them here. I personally don't want that. So I'm going to just turn off the checkbox. Then you can include other information along with your images. You can show the Rating Stars, if these images have been rated, next to your picture. This I don't believe has been rated. I can show a text overlay, if I want to. And if you actually move this thing out of the way, or turn it off, my Identity Plate, see right there? Shot somewhere other than here. But that is something where you can control what information is put in there. And that's called a text overlay. If you turn it on, on the right side of your screen, you can choose the Color, the Opacity, and the Font. Then you can click within your image and drag this around to control where it shows up. Should it show up relative to the picture? And if so, should it be just below? Or should it show up relative to the center bottom of your screen and be right there? And then, right down here at the bottom, I can choose what appears in there. Should it be the filename for this image? Or should it be something else? If I choose Custom Text, then I can actually type in what I want right next to that. And then I could change it for each image as I go through this slideshow. I'm gonna turn that off, though. I preferred it when we had our little Identity Plate. Just trying to make a nice little setup there. If we do a text overlay, I think we can also add shadow to it. So we have that choice down below. But let's go now to this area called Backdrop. We can choose what's actually behind our picture. And before I even get into the Backdrop, let's get rid of these guides, 'cause they're not gonna actually be there when we are actually playing our slideshow. It's under Layout, and I'll just turn off that checkbox so we're not distracted by it. So here under Backdrop, we have a couple choices. First, if I turn off this area called Wash, then down here we have an area called Background Color, if those are both off, then we're gonna default to blackness. If I wanna change that color, I can turn on Background Color. On the right side is a rectangle I can click on, and I can choose any color I want. Then up here, I can add a color wash. And over here on the right side, I can choose what color does that wash start from. And here I'll choose a black. And then if I bring my Opacity up or down, I can control how strong it is and what angle it's using. So therefore, it's gonna be mixing two colors; the color we have on here, having that fade out to the background color that's down here. If I want something fancier, though, than just this color, I could turn off these two check-boxes. And as an alternative, I could use a background image. To use a background image, I can come down to my Filmstrip, and in my Filmstrip, I can grab any image that's here and just drag it to this little rectangle on the right side of my screen and let go. And now it has that other picture back there as my backdrop. Well, you probably wanna keep around some simple images. If I go over here to my Collections, I'm gonna come down here, let's see if I can get to my Collections, and see if I have any logos and graphics. I'm lookin' down here. I could have my letter BW and have that be in the background so it's really big. Or a lot of the times I end up using textures and other images. But in this case, I'm gonna limit ourselves to not using that background image. If you wanna preview it, I'll show you what they look like over here with our templates. When I was actually careful about what I was using, here are some textures. And if I hover over these, and you look at the preview, there's a picture of a desert, here's some stucco. These are just random textures. And I'll set those up and save them as templates. The way I use them, though, I was careful with what images I had. When I went into the Slideshow module, I just turned on this checkbox called Background Image. Then I went down here to my Filmstrip, and I dragged the texture that I had in there up to this little square. You can also lower the Opacity. So if you don't want it at full strength, we could lessen it. In this case, though, we'll keep it simple. Let's go for a background color with a color wash. Next is Titles. And Titles is what's going to appear at the beginning and/or end of your slideshow. And so if you turn on this checkbox called Intro Screen, then this is what is going to appear at the very beginning of your slideshow. If you remember, when I did my very quick slideshow of Command + Return, it's known as an Impromptu Slideshow, it had my name and the words Lightroom Classic appear on the screen before the first image. And that was because this checkbox was turned on to do an intro screen. And so if you do that, you can have either just a solid color by turning on this checkbox and turning off the one that is below it, or you can turn this on so you can use an Identity Plate. And therefore you just come down here and switch to whichever Identity Plate you happen to want to use. And that's what's going to be displayed before your slideshow starts. I can also scale. If I click the Scale icon, it'll preview what I'm about to have here. And I can make that nice and big. But this is only gonna preview for a few seconds, and then it'll show you the first slide of your slideshow. We could also have an ending screen, and oftentimes for my ending screen, what I'll end up doing is I'll use an Identity Plate, and I'll have it have you web address on it. So here is BestofBen.com as an Identity Plate, and if I use that, although it's not great on a white background. So I might override my color. And if you look in this preview down here, that's the actual Identity Plate. But you can see that white text on a white background isn't gonna show up. So I either need to change the background color that would be used there, or here, I'll override the color. And I might change it to maybe a red like that. So that's what you'd see at the end of my slideshow. And here I'll scale. But you're only gonna see that preview for a few seconds as you're adjusting these images. The moment you stop messing with the settings that are here, it brings you back to the first slide of your slideshow. So if you make it so your slideshow is manual, where you're gonna control it with the arrow keys, and you make it so it does not repeat, then you can have this intro screen show up before you use the arrow keys to start showing your images. And once you get to the absolute final slide, this will show up, and it'll just stay there on-screen. Because that'll be the end of your slideshow. That's called Titles. We can do our Intro Screen for the beginning of our slideshow and our Ending Screen for the end. Now we can come down here and do music. In order to do music, there's a little plus over here on the right. And you can click on that. And now we can choose music. If you have any MP3 files, you're welcome to point Lightroom to them. Here I'll hit Choose. And you can actually add more than one song here. If I hit plus again, I can grab another one. Hit Choose. And if there's one I don't want in here, I can click on it, and there's a little minus sign. I can get rid of it. And if I wanna change the order of these, I think I can drag to put the one at the top. Or drag it and put it at the bottom. It tells me the length of my music. And now I'm gonna have music for six minutes and 52 seconds. And that's where, if I've specified my music, down here under Playback, I have that choice called Fit Music. And all it's gonna do is come in here and say, all right, how long is this? It was six minutes and 52 seconds. So what settings would I need to use in here for the Slide Length in order to make it so my slideshow ends with the music. So I'll hit Fit Music. And I see that it's going to end up showing an image for 11 seconds. Well, that's a long time. So I probably have too much music. I'll go up here to my Music, and I'll delete one of these two songs just by hitting the minus sign. So now we're down to three minutes and 24 seconds. Come back down to Playback and hit that button once again. Now it's only 5.5 second per image. That's still a slow. I might wanna add a few more images to my slideshow, or at least bring up here my Crossfade to make it take a little bit more time to go between them. And if I tell it to fit to music now, five seconds for each image with a one second transition. There is also a checkbox here called Sync Slides to Music. And I believe that's actually gonna look at the tempo of the music and try to choose when the slide is going to change so that it seems know it is in alignment with the music. If I remember correctly, that is what it's gonna do. I don't do a lot of slideshows with music, so I don't have extensive experience with these. And those are pretty much the settings that we have for our slideshow. Now, there is one other area where we have choices related to that. And that's up here at the top of my screen. There is a menu called Slideshow. And here I can make a brand new template or a new template folder. That really is the same thing that can be done over here in the Template Browser. You just hit the plus sign there, and that also creates a new template. So let's make one. I'm gonna click there. And I'm just gonna call this on blue wash with, BW, Ben Willmore logo. Put it in User Templates. This is a folder you wanna put it in. If you wanna create a brand new folder, you can do so there. But I'll put it in User Templates. I hit Create,. And it's just created a template that contains all the settings that are shown on the right side of my screen. So I could either do that on the left side of my screen with the plus sign that's here, if I collapse all these down, I should find User Templates, and there is the template, or I could have gone up to the Slideshow menu, New Template, New Template Folder. It does same thing as those others. Once I have my slideshow and it's done, another choice that I have is to export it as a PDF file. Therefore I can email it to somebody else. It'd be looking just like this, but it'd be a PDF. I could also export it as a JPEG. So if I want individual images for each slide that's here, but they have this visual look, that's what I could use. Or I can export this as a video file. If I wanted to get this slideshow to be on social media, like Facebook, or YouTube, or anything like that, I would most likely export it as a video, and then upload that video file. So you see the various other choices that are in here that are relatively straightforward. There is one extra, though. And that is, both at the very top of my slideshow right here, it says Create Saved Slideshow, and in the Slideshow menu, Create Saved Slideshow. What does that do? And it also warns me in the upper left, this is an unsaved slideshow. Well, if I've gone in here and I've dialed in all the settings that I want, I don't want to have that messed up. Because if later on, next time I come into the Slideshow module, I have a completely different set of images and I go over there and change the settings, it's gonna take me awhile to get back to this look. So if I click that button that says Create Saved Slideshow, it's gonna do a couple things. It'll ask me for a name. And I'm gonna call this Venice on blue. I'm gonna put it inside of a collection set, if I have one. If I don't put it inside of a collection set, it would be in the base level of my collections. In fact, I can do that, I'll just turn that off. Down here it wants to know other settings I should use. Make New Virtual Copies, what that means, if you're used to virtual copies, the reason it's here is if you want these pictures to remain looking exactly the same, even if somebody goes to change the original raw files. If they bring 'em into the Develop module and maybe make 'em black and white or something else, it wouldn't affect this slideshow. Because this slideshow would be utilizing virtual copies so that any change to the original wouldn't affect the slideshow. And these other choices aren't really critical for what we're doing. So let's just save this. Hit Create. Takes it just a few minutes. It's got it all set up. And it shows it to me on my left side of my screen, right there, Venice on blue. And that's a special collection. If you look at it, it's got a little play button icon. And it tells me how many images are in my slideshow. And so then in the future, if I'm ever out of the Slideshow module, instead I'm back here in the Library, let's say, and I'm viewing a completely different folder of images, and somebody asks have I ever been to Venice, and I'm like, well, yes, I have, I can come right down here to my Collection list. And if I can find that choice called Venice on blue, I can click on it and see all the images that were used within. If I had that checkbox turned on called Use Virtual Copies, you'll notice that the corner of each one will have it turned up. That indicates that these are virtual copies. And if I actually wanted to play the slideshow, you see an arrow to the right when I hover over this, if I click that arrow, it's gonna bring me to the Slideshow module. It's gonna load up all the settings on the right side of my screen for this. And it's gonna remember the images that I had chosen. So all I need to do is hit the Play button. And now you can see the logo that comes up at the beginning. And it starts my slideshow. If I have music, it would play the music. I muted, just 'cause I didn't want my computer makin' noise. So we have a nice little slideshow set up. So I think it's worth spending time going to the Slideshow module and creating some templates. If you look at my templates, when I'm in the Slideshow module, I end up creating ones that have solid colors. So if I want my slideshow on black, on white, on gray, and then maybe on red, green, blue, or something, then I have the choice of doing so. And I can do it with a single click to load these templates. I have Gradient Backgrounds, where it has a wash going from one color to another. And there I'd usually have a black, a white, a gray, maybe a red, green, blue, and a few other colors, so I can get to those. Remember the Preview area above, if you hover over these, can show you what they would look like. So it's rather quick, just a single click, to change what style you're using. I also have one with textured backgrounds. So here. See how quick it is to switch between them. And all I've gotta do once I find what I want is hit Play. And now I have it on that textured background. I'll hit Escape to get out of that. So I could set some up with textures, whatever my favorite types are. Down here, I have my watermarked ones. Those will be hard to preview in that little thing. But if I click on, it might be a little easier to see that down here, in the lower left corner, there's a watermark on the image. And then I have With Logos and Text. So here I can get the layout with my logo at the bottom, just with a single click. And I have different versions of that that simplify it. Well, it took me maybe a total of an hour to set all these up. All I was doing was playing with the settings. Once I got the settings set up for one of those color washes, I was just changing one setting to create the others. I changed the background color from black, to red, to green. And each time I made a change, I saved a new template. So about an hour's worth of your time, you'd be able to create a good number of these templates. Well, one thing you should know is there'll be one template that's special. If you look in this list, you'll find there's one template, always, that has a plus sign at the end of it. That's your default. That's the one that will be used if you ever go to the Window menu and choose Impromptu Slideshow, or you press Command + Return. And so why not set it up? Because if you don't choose one for that, Lightroom will choose for you. And I think the default might be this one which has the caption at the bottom and has a rating visible, which is not what I'd wanna usually use. So how do we set something for the default? Well, let's say my default should be the one with my logo. This one. All I'm gonna do is right-click. And if I right-click on this, there's a choice called Use for Impromptu Slideshow. And when I use that, there should be, at the end of this, a plus sign, if I can expand it out far enough, to indicate that that is now my default, the one where if I just use the default keyboard shortcut, we can get to it. There are a few other choices we have. When you're viewing this bar on the left, you do have Export PDF and Export Video. They do the same thing as what we had when we were up here and we could do PDF or video. We have some control over our slideshow. If we just wanna cycle through it and see what it would look like with all the images, well, we have the left and right arrow keys over here, where we can cycle through all the pictures that we currently have. The big square on the left means go back to the beginning, the very first slide. Next to that, you can choose what exactly should be included in your slideshow. If I click, if it's All Filmstrip Photos, that means every photo I was viewing at the time I went to the Slideshow module. If I don't wanna use every single photo, then instead I could come down here to the Filmstrip and pick only those images that I would like in my slideshow. I'm holding down the Command key, Control on Windows, and just clicking on individual images. And let's say I only wanted those that I have highlighted. Well, then I could use this, Selected Photos. And therefore it's not gonna use every single image that's down there. Finally, I could also limit it to only those images that are flagged as a pick. So you just gotta be conscious of what that's set to. In this case, I wanna use them all. We have a Play button here. This Play button will allow me to preview it while I still have Lightroom's interface visible. Therefore I could go to the right side of my screen and tweak some of the settings. The Play button in the lower right, though, is different. That Play button always goes fullscreen and hides everything. My music file's missing, it's just not on my hard drive, for that template. So that's all right. So you get the sense for the difference. This means play it within the inteface. I know that's missing. Play it within the interface, so I see it here. And the Play button in the lower right means play at fullscreen with no interface. Now, you've gotta be careful, though. Here where it says Quality, if this is just set to Standard, it's not always gonna look good. You probably wanna bump that up to High before saving this as a template. Because I noticed my logo and some other things didn't quite look the highest quality. So that is creating slideshows. But now let's do something with slideshows that's a little bit more interesting than making a slideshow. Let's hack Photoshop. Let's get it to do something it's totally not designed to do, but it's really got the right features to accomplish. And that is let's make a time lapse. I'm gonna switch to a different collection of pictures. If I go here, either go to the Library, or I just go down here to my Collections, I believe I have some images here that I could use for time lapse. And I'm gonna switch which template that I'm using. I'm gonna use one with a solid-colored background. It's just called Fill Full Frame. And that's where it's gonna absolutely fill the screen so I won't see any background or anything else. And just double-check my settings over on the left side. I'm gonna make sure that we don't have any starting or ending screens. See, right now we have a start screen, and we have an ending screen. I'll get rid of those. So what have I done? I pretty much got the simplest template I could find, one that makes my picture fill the entire screen, where you don't get any extra space around it. I made sure it had no beginning and ending area. And I got that set up. Well, then, you know how I can go to the side over here, and I can save things as a template? Well, let's do that. I'll hit the little plus sign that's here. And before I actually create it, let's make sure that this slideshow plays as fast as it possibly can. So I'm gonna go over here to Playback. I'm gonna set it for the absolute lowest length in my Slideshow. And I'm gonna make it so the Crossfade between slides is set to zero. That's the fastest I can get it to go. Well, how fast is that? That is one second. So therefore an image will show up for a second before the next picture does. Well, I have 166 pictures at the moment. And so down here it tells me, this is gonna take two minutes and 46 seconds to play back. That's too slow. Before, we need to hack this. We need to be able to somehow get this Slide Length to be less than a second. Here's how you do it. I'll go to the left side of my screen. In the Template Browser, I'll save this as a template. And I'm gonna just call it Hack Me. Not heck me, Hack Me. I can point it wherever I want. We're gonna end up deleting it in the end. But I'll hit Create. So now if I look over here, you can see the template. It's called Hack Me. Now let's go hack it. Now I'm gonna right-click on it. And that's where I'm gonna find a choice called Export. When I export this, I'm gonna put it somewhere where I can remember it. In this case, I'll put it on my Desktop. And so all I did was navigate to my Desktop, and I'll hit the Save button. Let's hide Lightroom now. And let's go find what we just made. Here it is. If we look at, it looks like it's a Lightroom preset. It's called Hack Me.lrtemplate. Looks like a pretty fancy file, like it's really specialized for Lightroom. It's not. It's just a text file. The only thing that makes the icon look the way it does is the file extension on the end. I'm actually going to select that file extension on the end. I'll copy it with Command + C on my keyboard. Or you can go to the Edit menu to copy. Just so I can paste it back in. 'Cause we're gonna change it back to this in a few seconds. But I'm gonna change the file extension to txt and press return. txt is what you have for a standard text file that has no formatting on it, just the text. So now that we've changed it to txt, it no longer thinks it relates to Lightroom. Instead it thinks it's a normal text file, like any other you've ever seen. And if I go here and just double-click on it, hopefully there's a program on my computer that's capable of opening text files. Now we have it in our text editor, whatever the default text editor. On a Mac it's called TextEdit. But this could just as easily be Microsoft Word or some other word processor. And if I expand this out, I can see what's in it. And if I actually look what's in here, it's not all that complicated. Let's take a look at what's here. Well, first off, it's telling us a color. And here's the amount of red, green, and blue. That the be the background color for our slideshow. Here it says dropShadowAngle. Well, wasn't there a choice for adding a drop shadow behind your picture, and you could choose the angle? Not only could we choose the angle, we could choose the offset, the opacity, and the radius, which was how soft the edge was. If we wanted to use text, we could have picked the font. Well, all that is is all the settings that are in that template written out as text. But they don't expect you to open this, so they didn't make it all that friendly, if you come through here. I don't expect you to read through this stuff. But all we need to do is do a search. I'm gonna do Command + F for Find. And I'll type in speed. It'll take it a moment, but here are two settings for speed. One is the speed itself. And the other is the transitionSpeed. So I'm gonna take this setting right here called speed, and I wanna change it. Usually the lowest setting we can get to is one second. But right here I can type in 0.5 to get a half a second. Well, most video is played back at about 30 frames per second or just a little bit less than that. So what I would need to figure out as a decimal, what is 30 frames per second? And I could just pull up a calculator to do that. I usually use what's Spotlight on my Macintosh. It's this little icon in the upper right for searching. And I'm just gonna type in 1/30. That means one divided by 30. And it'll do the math for me. And so here, 0.03333 is what I could type in. So that means right here where it says speed, I'm gonna type in 0.0333333. That means 30 frames per second. But some people have tried that setting, and they claim that it ends up creating an image that just flickers a little bit when played back and that to get a smoother playback, they ended up using 29.97, I think it is. I have it written down somewhere. 29.97 is what they prefer. And so if I do the math on that, I just do one divided by 29.97, we're gonna get this number right here. I can just select it right here. And I'm gonna copy it. Then I'm gonna put it in right here for the setting called speed. I'm just gonna choose Paste with my keyboard shortcut. I could have done it from the Edit menu instead. But now, instead of having a speed of one second, we're gonna have a speed of 29.97 frames per second. Because this is gonna be a slideshow that plays back that fast. So I'm just gonna save this file. Just choose Save. It'll save it right back into the original. I'll close it. And unfortunately, I ended up copying and pasting that number. So I no longer have the file extension copied. I need to put this back to the original file extension in order to get Lightroom to remember it. I think it was called lr, and then was it template? I don't recall. I can always find out. If I type it in and it goes back to the right icon, I probably did it right. Or I could simply export another one of these and look at what the file extension is. But it looks to me like I most likely got it right, lrtemplate. So what have we done? We exported a template that we had saved from Lightroom. It came out in what looked like a special file format of lrtemplate. We simply selected the file extension on the end, changed it to txt, then we opened it in a word processor, and we searched for the word speed. And then to figure out what to put in there, if you know how many frames per second you want your time lapse to play back at, you just grab a calculator, put in one divided by, and then the number of frames you want. And whatever comes out the other side of that calculation will be a decimal. And paste it in for the setting called speed. Then save that file again. And go and change the file extension back to what it originally was, which I believe is lrtemplate. All right, let's go back to Lightroom now and see if we can actually use that. Remember, when we saved our template, these were the settings we had, one second transition. And that was the absolute lowest I could get this. I couldn't get it any lower. Well, now I go to the left side of my screen where I have my templates. I'm gonna right-click on any one of these templates. And I'm just going to choose the choice of Import. That means let me import from one of those files. I'll choose that file called Hack me, click Import. And it just brought it in. Since there was already one called Hack Me, it put the number two on the end. And let's see if it's any different than the normal Hack Me. Look on the right side of screen. You see Slide Length. If I click on Hack Me 2, down you see it actually went to zero? That's because the setting that we have in there was 0.03. And this is only showing you one decimal place back. So it is 0.0. It just doesn't show you anymore numbers beyond that. If it did, it would say 0.03, whatever the rest of that was. So now I'm gonna delete the original one. I'll just right-click on it. And I'm gonna choose Delete. Then I'll right-click on the one we just made. I'll rename it. And I'm just gonna call it Time Lapse 29. FPS for frames per second. And just to clean it up, I'll do a little at symbol to tell me that that's the rate it's at. Click OK. Now, if I want to export this series of images as a time lapse, first thing I'm gonna do is go down here to my Filmstrip and make sure I got all the images I want. And if I look at these images, they all look related until I get right here. That means I have more than one time lapse in here. I wanna select only those images that relate to the time lapse I want. When it comes to what to include in my slideshow right here, I can either use all those photos or only the ones that are selected. So in this case, I'm using only the selected ones. 'Cause I had more than one time lapse sequence in the same folder. And I make sure I got my template chosen. And now I'm gonna choose Export Video. When I choose Export Video, all I need to do is tell it the size. Do you want 1080 so it's as high quality as an HD TV? Or do I want something smaller to get a smaller file size out of it? I'll give this a name. And if I hit Export now, you're gonna see a progress bar up here. As it exports each frame of this, it thinks it's doing a slideshow. But in the end, the file will play back as a time lapse. Now, while we're waiting for that to finish, I've already done that to a series of images. So let me hide Lightroom, and I'll show you what I've done. Here is that series of images. And I happened to do it at 25 frames per second. Here's what it looks like at 25 frames per second. I have another one here done at 20 frames per second. And I have another one here done at 15 frames per second. And all I did is I opened that template file and I put in different numbers for speed. I just typed the number one, the divided by symbol, and then how many frames per second I want. And if I do that, it only takes me about 10 minutes to duplicate this template file so I have maybe six copies of it. And then I can be changing the speed setting in each one. Then I import them back into Lightroom, and I can use all sorts of different settings. You can see right here that it's already saving that file. It's not quite done, 'cause here it saves two files. In the end it combines it together. Right there is the final file. It just finished. So here is the actual file we just created at 29.97 frames per second. Go back to Lightroom over here. And so I have this whole section right here called Timelapse. And if you look closely at it, I can do my timelapse at three frames per second. Five, 10, 15, 20. And that controls how quickly these videos are gonna play back. The fewer frames per second we have, the longer things will be. And what's nice is Lightroom will calculate it for me. 'Cause all I need to do is look down here and it'll tell me I have 87 slides selected, that's gonna be a total of two seconds long. Well, that's not a very long video. I change the template, let's see, 60 frames per second would make it only one second long, if you look in the lower right corner. 25 would make it three seconds. And I could just dial this down until I see the length I want. I want about five seconds long. So that equates to 15 frames per second. Then all I'd need to do is export it, and I would have a video that's five seconds long. So you get the sense for how we can hack Lightroom. And that's all because Lightroom records most things as metadata. And metadata means text. Any time we make an adjust in the Develop module, it's just writing down text of where did you move a slider, where did you end up. Any time we make a change in the Slideshow module, it's just writing down text. And that's why it doesn't take up very much space to be able to adjust and organize 220,000 photographs. Because all it's doing is writing down text related to everything. Well, sometimes you can hack Lightroom by messing with that text. You do have to be a little careful. Don't change just any setting in there. But changing the speed setting can do. Some people will actually try to charge you money for those templates that we just made. All they did, save out a template, change one number, and reimport it into Lightroom. Don't do that, do it yourself. You can do it. Then you go start sellin' those. (chuckles) All right, so that is creating time lapse. Now let's talk about how to present your images in a book. So I'm gonna come back to our same images that we used for our slideshow. Those are images from Venice. And let's say we wanna lay out a book and print it. So I go to the folder or the collection that contains all the images I want. And up here at the top of my screen, I don't have a choice called Book. Because when I talk about customizing Lightroom, I'll show you that you can show and hide these so only those choices you use on a regular basis are there. If I right-click, though, it'll show me all of the things. And I'll make sure the Book is visible. And then we'll go there. All right, so here's where we can lay out our booK. When you go to the Book Module, at the top of your screen will be a Book menu. And there's a couple choices that are in there, the main thing being Book Preferences, I find to be important. When I choose Book Preferences, the most important setting is this one. Do you want it so it takes your photographs and makes them totally fill the page or just fit the page? Fit or fill. I usually have this set to fit. Because if it fills the page, then if you have a square photograph, but you have a horizontal book, it's gonna have to crop into that square image in order to fill up an entire horizontal page. And I find I don't usually like the way it ends up cutting off parts of the image. So I'm setting this to Zoom to Fit. Down here it asks, do you want it to automatically lay out your book for you? Meaning, are you in a hurry? If you're in a hurry, you can turn on this checkbox. And then in less than a minute, it can easily lay out a 100-page book for you. But I prefer to spend a little more time and manually lay out, or pick what each page looks like. Because it's gonna look better. So I'm gonna turn that off. And then I'm gonna close this. And let's make a book. First, there is some text here overlaid on my picture. I wanna hide that, because I find it to not be all that useful. It's distracting instead. If you go to the View menu, there should be a choice in here, something about an overlay. Yeah, right there, Show Info Overlay. I'm gonna turn that off, get rid of that. Then at the bottom, just below this page of the book, there are three icons. The icon to the right means show me a single page, one at a time. The icon in the middle means show me a two-page spread. So I see the two pages that would be presented to somebody side by side. And then the choice on the far left means show me multiple pages. So I can scroll through and see maybe my entire book. So you can choose your view that you'd like to have there. Then there's a slider called Thumbnails. And if you bring it down, you can make that even smaller so it's easier to see multi-page books. And if you're in this view, you can usually zoom up on things. If you double-click on a page, it'll zoom you up just looking at that page so you can mess with just it. And then you could use the icons at the bottom to get back to viewing more or less of this. Now, you notice that it already put some images on these pages. And I want to do things manually. I don't want it to make any of those automatic decisions for me. So at the very top, there's a choice called Clear Book. And if I choose that, I'll start off with only the back cover and front cover of my book. And then if you were to open a back and front cover of a book, you would end up seeing the inside of the front cover, and then your one page that you could use in your book. So I'm gonna hide the left side of my screen. 'cause I'm probably am not gonna need it right away. We wanna maximize this area. And let's take a look on the right side of the screen. I'll collapse down all these sections so we only look at 'em one at a time, so we don't see too much at once. Here's our book settings. We have a few choices. Here I can have it so we're gonna end up saving out a PDF file. Because maybe this is gonna be an ebook, where people download it off the internet. And so therefore I could do a PDF. Or maybe I'm going to send this out to be printed. And if so, there's a company called Blurb that could print your book directly from Lightroom, where Lightroom would actually upload the book. You can order it directly for within Lightroom. If you don't wanna use Blurb, instead you have another preferred vendor for printing books, you could choose JPEG instead. And then each page of your book will be saved out as a separate JPEG that you could go and upload onto somebody's website that does books. In my case, I'm gonna choose PDF right now. You can always switch it later. Below that we have the size of the sheet of paper. And there's only so many choices available here. And that's because Lightroom's Book module is based on templates. Just like Lightroom's Slideshow module and everything else, we're limited in what we can do. So we need to choose only from one of these five templates. So I can do a nice little square book. And it'll relay out my book if I already have pictures on it. Or I can go with portrait or landscape. I'm gonna for a nice, large, 13 by 11 landscape book. And it would relay out my book if I told it to. I can tell it what kind of cover it should have, hardcover with a dust jacket or not. This is mainly if you end up doing it through Blurb. Because then what it'll do is it will tell it what kind of cover you have. Also, it will calculate the spine thickness. So I could put text on the spine of the book. So it's helpful to have. Then here it's just gonna ask what kind of settings do I want when I output it. Do I want my JPEGs to be high quality? If so, the file size will be larger. Or if this is an ebook download, I might wanna limit that to keep the file sizes reasonable. What Color Profile would you like? If it's for printing, I like Adobe RGB. But it depends. If you're gonna send the book to someone else to be printed, they might prefer one of these other choices. And if you want sharpening. Now, this next section is called Auto Layout. And in there, I have the choice of either clearing the layout that's already there, or if I just hit this button called Auto Layout, just one click, it just laid out a 63-page book for me. And it just takes it awhile to update the screen. It happened to do it where there's one picture per spread, and it's on the right-hand page. But I can change that. If you look right here, it says Preset. And you see it says Left Blank, Right One Photo. Well, if I click there, we have three choices in there in general. And if I switch between them, and then I could clear my layout and have it automatically lay out another one. And it takes that amount of time, not very long at all. But... Clear. There. One picture per page. I can end up with a nice, short, 32-page book. But in this case, the pictures are completely filling every page. And I don't like how that cuts off things, like the top of this dome structure. There's a statue up there that's cut off. So let's see what would have to happen to have more control over this. I'll hit Clear Layout. And we'll ignore this part here called Auto Layout. And instead we'll come down here to an area called Page. When we're on Page, here, we can get a preview of a page. And if I click on this little arrow next to it, this is where I can choose templates for pages. And here I can narrow down what I'm viewing. So if I want a page that only has one picture on it, here are the different ways I can do it. I can have it fill the page. I can have white space around it. I can have text at the bottom. I can have it fit the page instead of fill. And I can have text above and below, and so on. Just keep scrolling. It depends on which text you wanna add next to your photos, if anything. I can choose what I'd like. Here's even one with a fancy border around it. Let's click on it. Now, the moment I clicked on it, you notice it added a page. But there's no picture on that page. Well, it's up to me to choose which photo would appear there. So I'm gonna go down here to my Filmstrip. And I'm gonna look for a picture that I might think would be appropriate for that kind of a layout, find one right here. And I'm just gonna drag it right up there and let go. Then if I double-click on the page, I'll zoom up on it. And I see that the picture doesn't fill all the way. And that looks kind of odd when it comes to this. Well, if that's the case, I click on the picture, and here we have the choice called Zoom. And I could zoom up until it does fit that area. Then I can click within the image, and I can drag around to determine exactly what portion of the image is visible. Then if want to zoom out, remember we have the icons in the bottom left. I can zoom out and see our layout. Let's add some more pages. I'm gonna come over here again on the right side, click on that little down-pointing arrow. And let's do a layout that had two photos per page. And again we have all these templates. There's a whole bunch of them. Well, I'm gonna choose one that has two photos, kind of like this one, where they're above and below each other. And I'll double-click on the page to zoom up. And it ended up using the same photo that's there. Because what I did is I changed the template that was on that page instead of adding one. Right here is a choice called Add Page, or Add Blank, which, you can get a blank page. Or here it's just Add Page. That's a brand new page we can drag photos onto. So I'm gonna come down here to my Filmstrip. I'm gonna pick two photographs that I think might be appropriate for that proportion of image. Put one up here. Go back down to my Filmstrip. Look for another one that's a nice horizontal. Maybe this night scene. And if they don't fill, I click on them. And here again I can zoom up until it fits. And then I can drag it around to determine exactly how it is used. Do the same thing down here. If you double-click, you'll zoom up on the picture. Let me zoom back out. And I can zoom up. And again drag and get exactly what I want. And zoom back out. Now, here I have this page selected. Therefore if I make changes on the right side of my screen, it might affect this page. If I click away from the page, it can't change that page, 'cause it's not active. I can come over here. And now say I want a page that has four pictures. And here I want four square images, and I want them to fill the page full bleed. I click on that, and it just added that page. If I hover over it, you can see the various regions. And again I go back down here to the bottom of my screen. And this time I'm looking for images that are somewhat squarish. And I find this shot to put in one corner. And you can leave the Filmstrip open. I usually would. Mine's set to auto-collapse. But if you right-click on this little arrow, I'll say to do it manually. So this won't automatically disappear. Here's a nice, 'nother squarish shot. And let's see if I can find two more. If I don't see anything that's really close to square, we'll just have to do a little bit of cropping on 'em. There they are. If I wanna zoom up, I can either double-click on page, or I can click on the icons that are down below. And now we can zoom up on these. And I can move them around. So you can have quite a bit of control over your layout. But it does take a little bit of time. We'll have some other timer-savers once we get to the other settings on the right side of my screen. But for now, I just wanted to let you know that you could either have it automatically lay out your book, or you can choose from various templates in order to get your layout to be done. And so now let's start exploring other choices that are over here. We know that these are the templates. And we know we can add a blank page or add a page based on that particular template. Below that, we could have guides. And this can show us things like, especially if we're gonna print with Blurb, you can only put text so close to the edge of the sheet of paper while still having confidence that it'll never be cut off when you get back your book. Because it does use a sheet of paper larger than the actual sheet you're defining here, and then it trims away the edge. And so you could have it show the Text Safe Area, where if you keep your text within this, then they'll more or less guarantee that it won't be cut off. You can see the photo cells that you can drag onto. If I didn't already have photos here, it would be helpful. And I can see filler text, meaning text that, if I haven't added text yet, it will put in some kind of template text. Turn that off. Here's where I have the choice called Cell. And if I were to click on an image here, and I wanted some space around that picture, I can bring up Padding. And you see how it adds space, or padding, around the picture. So if you don't want it to go all the way out to the edge of a sheet of paper or the edge of its little box, Padding is what will let you do that. We have Text. In here is where I can add text to a layout. So let's say that I add a new page. I'll go back out here. And let's say we wanna go to a page. And I'm gonna do one that just has one photo and some space on it. You see here it says Add Page Text. If I click there, I could literally type in, here's where we stayed the first night. So I can add text to the page. And down here I can have photo text. If I click on a photo and I turn that on, it means have a caption for the photo. And so any time you click on a picture, you can usually come over here and say Photo Text, and then right down here, you would end up putting, this is the caption for this photo. Then if I drag a picture up into there, I'll have the picture and the caption. You can grab the caption. There's a little dot here. I think I can grab that dot, if memory serves, and drag it around to say should it be at the bottom and this far away from the picture, or should on the top and that far up. So you can fine-tune it. You can also move the picture a little bit. And if I do, the caption would move a little bit, possibly with it. I can, here, do Custom Text. Custom Text means text that I type in myself. Or I could have something else, like the date the photo was taken, the file name, or other stuff that is stored in the photo's metadata. So I don't have to type it in for every photo. Instead it would automatically be generated. But Custom Text is what you need if you wanna be able to click on the page and actually type in your own text. And these are our choices. We can have it Below, Over the image, meaning right on top, or Above. And if I click there, it would move it, just like I did when I dragged it. Then we also have our Page Text, which is text related to the page. If I turn that off you'll see the text at the bottom disappear. Turn it back on, and we can have it up here. I can decide, should it go on the top of the page, probably don't want it up there with the other text, or the bottom. And again, how far away it is from the edge. So it could be that this text says, second night in Venice, and then that starts the rest of that section of the book. Here we have Type. And this is where, for those various elements, we could choose the typeface, we could choose what color it is, what size the text is, and all that kind of stuff. It's relatively standard stuff. You could also choose, for instance, right now the page text is on the left side, I could just as easily center it, or I could make it justified if I had multiple lines of text. There's all sorts of things you can do to control the appearance of that. But it's relatively straightforward if you review it. Then we can also choose the background. If I wanna choose the background of this particular page, there's, just here, a choice, I can drop a photo here if I wanna have a photographic background. Or what's a little bit more fun is there's a little arrow here on the right, and there's a bunch of templates. And if I choose the choice called Travel, we can have things like a map put in there. And if I adjust the Opacity, you can make it easier or harder to see. Because you're making it show up less. Then I could go to a different page that has a bunch of white space on it. And I could choose a different one, like a compass star that's here, or various textures that they have available, or even little dashed lines. So it looks almost like a coupon. So as you can see, you have a whole bunch of variability you can put into this. But it is all based on templates. If you turn on this checkbox called Apply Background globally, then every single page of your book will have the exact same texture, whatever you choose down here. After applying one of those, if you decide you don't want it, all you need to do is turn off a little checkbox. You might instead wanna change the background color by turning on this checkbox, and then clicking the box to the right. And you can choose any background color you'd like. So as you can see, you can create relatively sophisticated books here. And you can lay out things. You should be aware, though, that so far we've only used templates where a picture is always contained within a single page. One of the other choices that you have in the Page area, in these separate choices that are here, are Two-Page Spreads. And with Two-Page Spreads, you can have an image span two pages as a single image. You can have it full bleed or a little bit of space around it, and so on. So just so you know, you should really explore all of the choices that are found in here. So here we'll add a two-page spread. And then we'll see if there's a nice, wide image down here somewhere that could span those two pages. Drag it up there. As you end up adding your images, then you'll find down here in the Filmstrip, some of your images will have numbers on top of them. And if you look in my Filmstrip, I see the number one here. One, one. And then when I get over here, I have the number two. That's the number of times that particular image has been used in this particular book. So that tells me that this picture is used twice. That's fine if that picture is used on the cover of the book, 'cause you're probably gonna have whatever's on the cover repeated inside. But if I start noticing that a lot of pictures have the number two on it, I might wanna look through my book and make sure I don't have too many repetitive pictures. And when I come down here to choose images to include in my book, then I probably wanna mainly choose images that don't already have numbers on top of them. Now, whenever you think you're done with your book, then we have a few choices. First, in the lower right, we have Export book to PDF. That's gonna create a PDF file. Now, the only reason it's called that is because up at the top, on the right side, under Book Settings, we told it to make a PDF. If, on the other hand, we told it to make JPEGs, then the button on the bottom of my screen will be different. It will say instead export this book as JPEGs. And if I told it to do this with Blurb, Blurb is the company that you can have print your book, you can come down here, and it says Send Book to Blurb. And you can send it right off to them. When you end up doing it with Blurb, it's kind of nice. Because if you come in here, you can specify not only the size of the paper, what kind of cover you have, you could also choose how nice the paper is. And then here, usually it can display an estimated price. And right now I'm not online. My Wi-Fi is turned off so I don't get notifications while I'm teaching. So no number appears there. But on your copy of Lightroom, you'll most likely see a number there. And if you were to come up here and change the settings, like go from Standard paper to a more expensive paper, you'll see the price increase. There's also a choice here called Logo Page. And that's because, on the last page of your book, Blurb likes to put their logo there. And if you tell it not to use that logo, they increase the price a little bit. Because therefore they can't advertise to your friends that you show this book to who made the book. And so it's nice that you can dial in all those settings. And then at the bottom here, you can literally send it Blurb directly from Lightroom. It's pretty cool. Finally, when you think you have your book done, mine's obviously not quite done, but when you think you have it done, near the top of your screen, there's a choice called Create Saved Book. And if I click on that, it's going to save this book, all the pages that are within it. It's gonna remember the photos that were used and all the settings that we have on the right side of the screen. So I'm gonna call this... And I can put it inside an existing collection set if I want, or not. I'll make mine be on the base level. I can make it only include the photos that I currently have. Or if I turn that off, it can include all of 'em. So the next time I come in here to the Book module, I'll still have the other photos that are not yet in the book. I can make it create new virtual copies, which is going to make it so if I adjust the original pictures that these images will not be affected, 'cause they show up as a separate picture. I'm not gonna do that, 'cause I don't want it too cluttered up, and a few other settings. So I'm gonna click Create. Now let's get out of the Book module. I'll go back to the Library module. And let's take a look over here on the left side of my screen, where I usually find Collections. Check it out. I have a new one called Venice Book. It has a special icon that looks like a two-page spread. And it tells me there are currently 32 images there. And if I ever wanna work on that book again, it doesn't matter which folder of images I happen to be viewing at the time. If I go over here to my Collection list and I see Venice Book, all I need to do is press the right arrow, this icon that's right there, click on it, and it'll send me right back to the book as if I never left it. And therefore I could come in here and continue adding pages. I can continue coming down here to the Filmstrip. It'll remember all the pictures I already had down here. So I could start dragging them up and spending more time laying out my book. You'll find there are some limitations of making the books. The main one is, I don't believe that there are any templates that will allow one photograph to overlap another, to get really fancy with your layout. If you want to do that, it is possible. You just can't do it directly using the templates that are built into the Book module. What do you do instead? Well, what you can do instead is go to the Print module. In the Print module, one of your choices for layout is Custom Package. And with Custom Package, if you defined this as the same page size as the book's page, you could come in here and drag images onto the page. You can grab their corners and resize them. And if I grab another picture and drag it onto the page, I can easily get these to overlap. And I could use all the settings related to the Print module to define this. When I'm completely done, and I'm not gonna get fancy and actually make this look too exciting, but I'm just showing you you can overlap pictures. When you're done, over here in this area called Print Job, just set it to JPEG File. And if you set it to JPEG File, then down here you have the choice of Print to File. And that means it will create a JPEG image that looks exactly like this layout, where I can have multiple images overlapping. Then import that image into Lightroom, and go and use it in the Book module. Just fill a page as if it's using only one picture. And it'll be this picture, the one you made in the Print module. I don't know, this one's an ugly version. But I just wanted to give that as a bit of a tip. So now that you know how the make slideshows and books, you got some homework. Your homework is to spend some time in the Slideshow module. It's not a place that I like to go to and actually play with the settings, but I'm willing to go in there for maybe about an hour and create a bunch of templates. Because if I invest that time and create a series of templates, then it's very easy for me to apply them in the future. And I can use 'em for years and years afterwards, never thinking about 'em again. So in your homework, you'll have a PDF that gives you some ideas on what you might wanna consider when creating various slideshow templates. Now, we have one week left in class. And in that week we have a bunch left. We're gonna talk about how to refine your workflow, the way you move through Lightroom. We're gonna give you a bunch of tips and tricks about using all the features found within there. And we're gonna get into troubleshooting. So if anything ever goes wrong with Lightroom, hopefully you'll have an idea of how to fix it. Next week is all about optimizing your workflow, though. So that's what our whole thought process will be for an entire week. Now, before we get into next week, though, why don't you head over to Facebook. You could spend your whole weekend there. You know you have in the past. But this time you could spend it in our own private group. If you go to the website I have listed on the screen, and you ask questions, you can make comments. You can let us know what you do special with your slideshows. If you purchase the course, know that that's how you can get the most out of it. First off, you can play back this video as many times as you want. You can rewind it. And also, you get a PDF workbook. The workbook reminds you of exactly what is covered in the lesson so you don't always have to play the video. 'Cause sometimes it's much faster to remember something just by glancing at a PDF. We also get you a lot of Lightroom catalog files to work with so you can adjust a lot of the same images that you see me use here on-screen. And I include things like templates, like those time-lapse templates. I'll include those so you don't have to hack yours. I will have done it for you. If you want to find me on the internet, why don't you go to DigitalMastery.com. That's pretty much my home on the internet. Or if you wanna find me on various social media, here are three good choices: Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. This has been another installment of Lightroom Classic: The Complete Guide.