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Creating Custom Layout

Lesson 8 from: Making Books in Lightroom

Jared Platt

Creating Custom Layout

Lesson 8 from: Making Books in Lightroom

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

8. Creating Custom Layout

Lesson Info

Creating Custom Layout

We can save our own custom pages in here, but if we really want to trick it out and we want to come up with something really, you know, nutty and crazy that's what the print module, khun dio so I can go to the print module, and once I'm in the print module, I can make a page that's the same size as my current book, and if I was doing a book that was landscaped like this, then I would want to have a page that was roughly eight by ten and it's not exactly a by ten it's actually, uh, ten I'm sorry, we're doing twelve this twelve twelve on if it's, if you're doing a twelve by twelve book, the actual page size that's going toe blurb is twelve by eleven point something, something something and the way you know what that is is by going to the book module and let's go to let's, make a twelve by twelve books. I'm going to go twelve by twelve and it's going to re edit the page, see how totally messed up on certain things because it's changing the entire book structure so it can't take that setti...

ng and move it over, but once I have a twelve by twelve book if I go up to the j peg option here and say I want to send out a j peg and then come down to the bottom of the j peg area I can export the book is a j peg when I exported as a j peg its going to export photoshopped type j pegs to wherever you want them to go take one of those j pegs and open it up and photo shop and that will tell you the exact size of the j peg ok, so in our case when I go to the print module I've created a twelve by twelve page and I've made a uh right here in my template browser here so this is the template browser and I've made a ten by ten template if I click on that ten by ten temple and go to page set up you can see that the ten by ten is actually twelve inches zoom in here it's twelve inches by eleven point eight seven it's not actually square which is unfortunate that they haven't figured out that we want if twelve by twelve just give us a twelve by twelve now we get a eleven point eight seven by twelve but it is what it is and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to set up a page size that's exact to the size that blurred wants then I'm going to save that as a template right here in the temple it you just click on that little plus button just like you do on all presets and you name that thing and put it in the folder once you've done that let me show you what I've set up here I am doing a custom package okay? They're three three different options in the print module single image picture package custom package with a custom package I can just grab an image and drag it here grabbing image drag it here for out of it and drag it there aiken size this one to be like that aiken size this one to be right there with same sizes that one and this one to be right here at the same size as that one and just kind of put them together and you know do whatever I want to do with these in okay so now now that I've done this and I like you know I like all of my like where everything is now I just hit print to file when I hit print to file I khun just name this uh custom page and if I did like by the way if I wanted to I could say ok I did that page and say there were twelve pages I wanted to do for this book that couldn't be done inside the book module because they needed to have you know this this one needed to be right here and it needed to be like that big right? Okay, so I wanted that page but they didn't have it and then I wanted to make another one I would just simply make a new page by coming down here so in the cell area inside of my print module there's one called new page and if I click on new page adds a second page and then I could you know, make this one like I don't know you could do most anything I'm about to do, but I'm just going there that's say you couldn't do that, but you can't do that, but for the sake of time on dh then I hit print to file and when I do that's going to save both of those pages out and I'm going to save it to a spot question is where do I want to put it? I'm gonna put it in the drive and let's just put it in with these little angels because that's the book we're making and I'm going to say put it in the, uh extra pages folder and it's going so it's printing those to the job. So once I've done that, then all I have to do is go back into the library and I just have to get that set of pages into light room so I'm going to go up to my little my little, uh, angels here and I'm gonna right click the little angels folder and there's an option here called synchronized to a fold this folder hits synchronized and look says there are two photos in there those are the two photos that I just created I'm gonna hit synchronize and now those two photos right there. Once I've got that there's the two photos, I can highlight those remember we work in collections, so I'm going to grab these two images here and I'm going to drag them into the little angels collection click on little angels collection there they are ready to go. I go back into my book and now I say, ok, I want to add a blank page and I'm gonna grab this page and there we go so you want to get really funky and do something really interesting? You can take these haven't had another blank page grabbed this one, put that there and I'm going to go down and add some page text and I'm gonna drag it way up here and I'm going to say I beat the system with exclamation points and then I'm going to make it really bold and big they're so I have just beat the system by using and I still haven't left light room I still have the ability to kind of move around within light room now one of the advantages of using light room now remember, we've just made j pegs and we've just stuck them in here so this will not be the case for things that you've created on your own like this but in most cases if you can stick with the the design of the book module itself the beauty of the book module is this once you have something inside of the book module let me go here and you've worked on something let's say you know this image here and you you look at it and you say I love I love this spread I love the way it looks there but I wish that I had it as black and white all I have to do is go from here to the develop module the same images picked turn it to black and white and work on you know the contrast or whatever and then when I go back to the book module it is in black and white and it's ready to go. A lot of the times I find that I designed my books before I really work on this and fuss on the way that the image should look I'll design the book and then once I have the book together then if I click on the images and I say ok, these images are definitely going to now be together on the same page now what do I do with um ok well this point now I'll go in and work on those images and adjust them, and so and this one I can just turn to black and white from here, so I'm going to say I want this these several images here we're going to go into the develop module and inside the develop module we're going to turn them to black and white and we're going to bring up the exposure because they're all little dark except you accept or whatever we need to do to them and then when we get back to the book, we're going to have those images adjusted, but we've got to go do all of these didn't select him, but anyway that's the idea so you have the ability to go back and forth between your images and the book design without ever leaving the same environment and that's really, really useful? Yeah, easy to move the pictures around in between the boxes when you're working on a page great, great great question let's go back into the book module and let's take this image and say this image should be down here so I grabbed this image and drag it it assumes this one should be over there if I grab this one and drag it over here, it flips the other one over here, so yeah, absolutely if I delete this one and then I dragged this one over here it just says that one's going to be the blank one um I can grab uh an image from down here and I can replace that one and that one just disappears so yeah there's there's a lot of intuitive moving stuff around. Um what what you don't do in light room is just grab the whole cell and move it here and there that doesn't necessarily occur hopefully in the future it will but right now it doesn't s o right now what you do is you choose your number of images and the basic template that you're going to use and then you start throwing things in but what they did when they created it was they went to the bookstore and they poured through a bunch of books and they look to see what were the common designs of all of the popular books in the bookstore on photography and they used all those styles to create this set of templates and then the templates air fairly, you know you can you can adjust the temple it's quite a bit, change its size and the location of different things and sell, you know, patting and all that kind stuff and that helps you to get the book to be much more unique to yourself first off before we leave anything there two buttons up here that you really want to know about clear the book so I really messed up and I think it's trash, I'm gonna clear it or create a save book once you create a save book it's actually going to come over here and it's going to make something that looks like this. Okay, so this is what a normal collection looks like. It's like two little frames, this is what a book collection looks like, and so when you make a book collection, it literally is the same collection of images, but it is in book form, so if I create a save book by clicking on there, it's going to ask me the name so I can call this little angels and then I can, you know, I can give it a couple things here I can say first off, where do I want to put it? I'll put it inside the book area inside of the little angels collection so that's all in the same place, and then I can include on lee the used photos. So if I click on that on lee, the ones that have been used for the book go into this book collection, if I don't check that than all of the images there currently inside of the book area are going to go with it because he's going to assume I might use some of those I could make all of them new virtual copies why would I do this? Because if I'm making a book and say three images are together, I might want them all to be black and white but I don't necessarily want to change my original image to black and white because it on its own should be a color but once is with other black and whites should be black and white and so if you're going to make a book for someone or for yourself and you don't want to like here's a great example if you're doing a portfolio so if I was doing this as a portfolio I may have an image here that's color in an image here that's black and white I need to change in multiple ac and white but I don't want to change the original one the black and white so instead of doing that I will make them all virtual copies that way I can fuss with them independently of what they're originals where so make all virtual copies you can also set it is the target collection which means that you can throw stuff there really fast by hitting the bee key be for boy that's great on dh then you can also what sync it with light room mobile so once you think it would light removal, then it starts sewing on your ipad you've made the book and now you're playing around with right so lightly mobile again by the way, we have a class on that. We do have a class on that, everyone, as part of this photoshopped week, election, jerry himself, that's, right? So go back and watch that if you want to understand how to use that function. Okay, so then, once I hit create, I'm not going to make virtual copies hit, create. And it has just created a little book over here called little angels.

Class Materials

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Jared Platt - Making Books in Lightroom - Reference Guide.pdf
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