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Lesson Info

Photobooks & Identity Plates

Now it's come back to light room and the next thing we're going to do, you can't close. That is, we're gonna set up this identity plate. This is called an identity plate right here. And it is a fantastic way to really at a professional level of branding to your copy of light room if your clients ever see it. Or if you ever do any kind of teaching, everything's very, very handy. So how do we do that? We're going to go up to the light room menu and we're gonna choose identity plate set up and we get a little editor kind of like that watermark editor that we saw a minute ago. And it's so easy peasy. And this is actually one of the typographic techniques that we're gonna learn on Wednesday is if you don't have a logo for your business and you want to create one and your name isn't too terribly long, just pair put it all in lower case. Make part of it sick and part of it thin, and call it in. I saw two instances of this exact treatment on the way over here to the San Francisco studios to Ha...

wk and big businesses. If you're driving home in the studio audience from here, keep a look out. It was a big design firm in another, like kitchen cabinet. Place just within, like a block from here, had this exact treatment on their logo. It works, its tried and true. It's timeless. I mean, you can make logos as hard as you want. This is an easy recipe for success, so this is just a text editor right here. So all I did was typed in photo lisa dot com. And then I selected, uh, this part, and I chose myriad because you'll know now that that's Lisa's favorite font and I chose a bold version. See all those styles and then you could highlight the second portion of the name and she's a light version. Any time you pair a thick within next to each other like that, it gives you some nice contrast, and it just is visually pleasing, so that's an easy way to do it. You can also bring in a graphic. So if I wanted to put a logo up there, I could. My particular logo is tall, so it's not really gonna work out well for me as an identity plate in light room, but your logo maybe more suitable, maybe a landscape orientation so you could click this radio button and then you just click and drag an image into the spot or you click, locate, filing navigates where the logo lives. We could go back to text and again, how we're gonna save a preset for this in the pop up menu. Save as Okay, so I've already got this identity plate in there. But let's make another one, shall we? So I'll go ahead and get rid of that so we can talk in type in a different name, not in all caps. So let's make let's see if I can spell it right. Did you get it right, Frank? All right, so Frank Bellafiore is in our class and I want to be Italians. That's why I keep having so much fun pronouncing his name. But if we wanted to apply that treatment to Frank's name, I would make the bull part the most important part, which, unfortunately, is not your first name. Frank. It's your last name that's so very important. So just highlight it. And then from the font style menu here. I would choose light and then I might make the rest of it go find my following me Read pro and I make the rest of the bold, easy peasy You guys can do this stuff. Graphic design is not rocket science. There are tried and true principles that just work, which is a great segue. Way to say all should all run over and by my graphic design for everyone class three days of practical graphic design techniques. This is a small portion of it, but see how nice that looks, frank. And now we can scoot our dialogue box down so we can see exactly what that looks like. And if you like it, come appear to the pop up menu. Choose Save As. And we call this one Frank B. And now it's always available. It's all switched back to me for the moment, and you can see I've got several appear. I've got photo Lisa for prints. So in the light room essentials class, we spend quite a bit of time in the print module. Reconsider custom like fine art prints. Well, I might want a different identity plate for that kind of thing or I might want a different I didn t play for slide shows and photo books and have as many of them as you want. Actually, my identity plate for, uh, Prince, I think, is my saying Sure. Oh, there's my signature. So of course, my signature doesn't work too well. Is this way bigger than that spot in light room? But for over in the print module, when I can actually add that is a graphic underneath a print makes it look like I've signed it. All that's in that light room essentials class. So really quick question about that. Of course, you're saying that this is specific to your adobe profile, but memories by at least a wants to know if you log on to another computer, Does it is that is a computer specific or the profile specific? The identity plate is just that. Is the computer specific? Yeah, I think I honestly haven't logged out of light room on one machine and logged in on another one to see if the identity plate will swap. It may, but I haven't tested that. But the creative cloud, the sinking part that would ever we added the light rain presets to the folder on Creative Cloud as a storage that that is created cloud account specific. Thank you. Okay, so let's say that's good. So we've got that one right there so we can just go ahead and click. Cancel because it's done. So that's how you do it. White room. I didn t play set up. If you want to use a graphic click that radio button bringing in or if you want to use tests, which I highly recommend, it's nice and clean than just format it right here. Thick within works really, really well, and you can call that in these different modules that we are about to go in right now. So now it's come back up here and let's create a photo book. So I want to show you what we're gonna make. So I'm clicking my because I saved the book. It shows up in my collections list, and when you point your mouse to one of these projects like that that you've created and you know it's a project because it's icon is different, see that icon looks like a book. That one looks like a slide to that one looks like a grid style web gallery. So that's what those mean. So once you create a saved project like that and I'm gonna show you how to do it when you point your cursor at that, I them you get a little right pointing arrow. Well, if you click that little arrow, that guy right there, it'll take you to the project over in whatever module it was created in. So let's just go ahead and give it a click, and then I'll take us over to the book module and give it a second. Look at this beauty. I'm gonna go ahead and press tab to hide my panel so you can see it. And I can change the size of my thumb nails by using the slider at the bottom. Right. But look at that photo book. Now. I got really excited cause we've got a studio audience member who also likes to do abstract art with your camera and that I'm all about that right now. I absolutely love it, and that's what you're looking at right here. So I was shooting in really low light conditions, and I was getting, you know, terrible, terrible shots. And so I decided, Well, screw this else. Keep my my shutter open for a really long exposure. And I just move the camera around and it was some brightly colored flowers under some light. So a really photograph those flowers would have looked like crap. I mean, ugly, but artistically, not too shabby. So that's what this is. And you can kind of see the shape and some of the flowers. Once I started doing and I got really excited about it and I started doing everywhere, so that's what this is. So here we've got the front cover of the book and the back cover, and we've got individual pages that I brought photos into and if you can see it and he could see it on this one I mean, if you can tell on screen or not. But the background is actually one of these shots with a very low opacity. And boy, how do you let me tell you, you want to make your thing like professional that will do it. So let me double click on this page. You kind of see it over here on the right. But that is an actual flour and adding a background to a printed look like that. That's really, really sure. You could also create a logo page that you could as the background. Not that I advocate putting your logo on every single page of everything you do. That also would be a little what a little horsy, little obnoxious. But if you're in a situation, um, let's say you're preparing. I mean, who knows what? There may be a situation where you want to you to do that or somebody makes you do that, which would probably be more often the case. So we'll look at how to do that as well. So let's go ahead and go back to you, viewing all of our pages here, just cruising around, showing you what we're gonna make for. We actually make it. You can see that I've got a different number of pictures on the pages. I've got some pages where the pictures hang off. The edge is I've got this page right here, which is a two page spread. So that's one photo that spans the width of both pages. And then I've put my logo on the last page of the book along with my Eurail so we can't. We can add a limited amount of text here in the light room book module like that. So let's go ahead and create this thing. I'm gonna go ahead and press tab to show my panels again. And then we're gonna go back to the library module by pressing the G key on our keyboard and for grid for good view. The first thing you want to do with any project is make a collection because that's where you can specify the order in which the images were going to come into said Project Far easier to do it in the collection that it is once you're over in that module because the modules all have a little bit of a different interface. So let's go ahead and create our collection here. Someone come up here to the in my folder structure on my hard drive. And how do I know that's where I am? Because I'm in the folders panel right here. So I'm gonna come up here to the Maui abstracts and you can see I had a heck of a lot of fun that evening and it was really, really dark outside with just a little bit of lighting. It didn't work out too well in the Hibiscus, but this one kind of looks like a like a hibiscus going at warp speed for new Star Trek fans out there. So I've already gone through here and added a star rating system. So let's limit what I'm seeing to just the photos that I like the best. So at the top of this panel and click attributes, and I know I don't have any three stars in there, so I'm just gonna click two stars. So let's say these air all the images that I want to put in my book now I'm gonna select all of them by pressing Commander Control a PC. So now they're all highlighted or selected. Now, I can come down here to my collections panel, click the plus sign, say, create selection. So we're going to call this one abstract for book or whatever is meaningful to you. I'm gonna tuck it inside. Ah, folder. I've already got going on just for organizational purposes in this demo. I'm gonna tuck it inside creativelive. But you might have a folder called Books you might like. I've got one right here. You might have a folder. Whole slide shows what have you so turn on? Includes selected photos seen? I can even make that as target collection. So go ahead and click, Create. And now I'm popped into that collection. So here, one time in my collection. This is where I can reorder these images. So I'm just going to click outside of the thumbnail on one of them just to de select the rest of them. Now I can specify what order I want these two appearing in my book. So let's say that these hibiscus aren't my favorite of the bunch. So I might click to activate those and scoop those down in the project like maybe at the end. And let's say, let's say this is my favorite one. So I might screwed it up at the top, so it would be automatically come in as the cover shot. There we go. So you want to reorder your images in the collection before you actually go over to the module in which you're gonna create the project? Your question. When you initially making the collection and you saved the images for use, why? Why did you not click new virtual copies? And what would happen if you click new virtual copies? Great question. Creating virtual copies just creates another instance of that image that you can apply different treatment, too. So instead of let's say I wanted, let's say I wanted to turn one of these black and white. But I also wanted the full color version of it. How would you do that? Like if I wanted to have a few black and whites? Then I could create a virtual copy of the original, and I could make the copy the black and white. That still leaves my original full color image so that I could include different versions of the same image in projects like this, like a book, Goro of Gallery or a slide show. So that's when when you would make virtual copies is not duplicating your image like you would have to you and Photoshopped. Because photo shop is in the database, you'd have to duplicate your image, but here in light room, you create a virtual copy, and it just gives you another instance of the photo. It's another pointer to the original photo, so light room creates another photo record in its database and keeps track of all the edit requests for that particular record. So that's how you would have like a si fi aversion and a black and white version in the full color version of the same shot. So that's how you do that. But for this particular project, I don't need to do that. But I could if I would. We went over virtual copies a lot in the locker room essentials class. So let's say that I am ready to go right now. So all I have to do is click Book appear at the top in that same, please create or select an auto layout. Preece it. Okay, so there's all kinds of wonderful presets that we've got in the program, so I'm gonna go ahead and let's see Click auto layout. Interesting. So what happened here is some of my presets disappeared, and that's a lot of fun. So let's come up here. This is a great reason to pop back into the light room preferences, such use light room preferences. And if it any point you have any weird stuff going like that, you can come in here and you can reset your preferences. So it kind of begs the question. How often does this happen? Well, it must happen often enough that there are buttons to reset all of them in the preferences. So for whatever reason, light room has forgotten that has any book layout preferences. I don't know why, but it's a great reason to show you how to do this. So I'm gonna come down here and choose restore auto layout presets, and that should fix our problem to close that. And now when we come in here, normally what happens is that RIM will auto flow your images into the default preset. But since my presets had apparently gone out to lunch and not come back, it didn't have any presets in there. So now I just clicked auto layout. This won't happen to you at home. But if it does not mean I don't fix it so at the bottom, right. We've got a thumbnail slider that we can use to change the size of the page thumbnails that we're looking at, and that really is what we're seeing right here. So you've got this little scroll bar here that you can cruise around with. So now let's go ahead and start to apply some of those presets that we just got back. So to do anything to a page, you got to click on it. Once you do, the page highlights, which, incidentally, is also how you can drag things around. But it won't let you drag cover around. She could drag these guys around. So we're going to click that little bottom the little downward pointing triangle with the bottom. And here's all the presets that we've got. So as you scroll down this page, you can see that there are a ton of presets. Pretty amazing, huh? And to apply them all you have to do is click one. So let's go ahead and find one that we like here. So let's say we like this when this is going to give us a full photo on the cover that that bleeds off the edge. So the gray part tells you how the photo is gonna be positioned. So this this has what's called a full bleed. So that means that the edges of the photo are bleeding off the edges of the page. Selous, go ahead and click. Teoh apply that. So it left the front cover alone because the photos already bleeding off the pace, so there was no change there. But you see on the back cover now we have a little opportunity for tech so we can maybe type. Are you are Ellen on the backs? When people are finished looking at our book an O, there's contact information right there, so that would be very handy. And of course, we've got a spot for text on the on the front cover as well. So that's how you change the templates. So let's go down here and click on another page. So this is the inside cover. So you're never going to be able to add a picture on the left side of this page because it's the it's the back of the cover. So that's why that's gray. So I could add Change the template on this one by clicking that little down pointing arrow and cruise through here and with a single page like this, I have even more options. So up here at the top, I can specify how many photos I want to be on this particular page. I tend to leave the first page as a full images for impact. That doesn't mean that you have to do that. So to each their own. So as I change my selection here noticed how my layout options change. So for two photos, I have all of these options, and you can customize them further. But this is a great starting point. So for three photos, I haven in different options. So again hours and hours and hours of fun with man. So for the two page spreads, do you have to select from one of the two page spread presets? You can't do them individually. It's easier if you start with the template. Yeah, so the question is, if you wanted to make a two page spread, would you have to start here and pick a template? It's easier that way. I'll show you how to fine tune Ah, photo size and placement on the pages manually. But if you could start with the template, it's a little bit of a timesaver to start that way. But once you click to pay spreads and you've got all these kinds of options and that needs so this particular one in the photo goes almost all the way across, and then another photo would be positioned on the right hand side. So all kinds of amazing things that you can do, and you could even create their some of these templates that are set up for specifically portfolios. So you might want to start with with the portfolio option here. If you want, start with one of these templates and then fine tune it in light room five. You can save your custom is ations to the existing templates. You can't do that in the near the version of the program, But to be honest, I've yet to really need to save a customer because there's so many wonderful templates. I haven't, you know, come across the need to build my own yet. So let's go ahead and go back to one photo for that particular one. And let's go ahead and change this page right here to have more than one photo. Now, my photo, my filmstrip, is still down here at the bottom of my interface. Eyes have it closed for screen real estate. So just click that arrow or that triangle rather, and so these are all the images that are in that were in my collection when I started the project, and you'll notice that they have these little numbers on top of their thumbnails that lets me know how many times they're currently being used in the book project. So this particular photos being used twice Why? Why did light room put it in there twice? Because it exists on the cover, and then light room automatically puts it on the first page because you don't want your pride. I mean, you want your prize winning photo on the cover, but you also want it in the book. So that's why light room automatically duplicates the image. But you can use images as many times as you want in the project, which is really neat. So let's say, for example, that I want this page right here and I actually have a a little cheat sheet of what the thing is gonna look like when I'm finished. There we go. So we'll say this page is good. So for this one, let's use two photos, so I'm gonna click that little click the patient, select it, click the little triangle, choose to photos from the resulting poppet menu and I'm going to choose one that has to on top of each other, like this guy right here. So because that page only had one photo on it, then my other photo box is empty. So all I have to do is find the other photo that I want to use. Let's say this one and drag it in from my filmstrip or this one. It's as easy as that. Let me make this a little bit bigger so you can see it better. So I'm just dragging from my filmstrip into the photo boxes. If I want to re arrange to photos, all I have to do is click and drag one down to the other box and they flip flop themselves. So it's really, incredibly easy. And I'm telling you, it's for me. It's very enjoyable to do this. I find it very pleasant, uh, to do this kind of thing. So now I'm gonna go back to viewing my finals of all the pages. I'm using keyboard shortcuts for this, but the buttons that determine what you're reviewing at any given time are right here kind of the bottom left of that little viewing area. So to get back to seeing all of your thumbnails pages. You would press command E on a Mac or control E on a PC, or you would just click this button right here if I want to see a double page spread, then I would click the next button over this guy right here or I repress command are so this keyboard shortcuts show up. If you just point your cursor at those icons, just let your mouse be still for a second and then you'll see this little tool tip come up. So that's how I'm switching between viewing all my pages, a double page spread or a single page. So now let's go back to viewing all my pages by person Commander Control E. And now I can continue customizing. So let's say for this one I want my image. I want white space on the top and bottom so I could try to find another template that does that by clicking the old triangle. And here's one right here. So now if I look at my page, my photo believes off the sides, but not on the top or bottom, so you can be incredibly artistic with this stuff. And again, I'm showing examples for photographers. But you could do this for literally anything. If you make a physical product, we've got a lady in the studio audience who makes beautiful jewelry. She could easily take photos of her jewelry and create books like this to take two stores, maybe in her, the town in which she lives, to see if those stores might carry her jewelry products. So So please open your mind about the type of imagery. If it's an image you can do, this doesn't have to be photography. You could be a designer and create portfolio books this way as what you could be a woodcarver and do the same thing if you took shots of your imagery. So let's go back to viewing all of the pages, and we'll just do a little bit more customization on some of these. I Let's take this one right here and let's click. It's little template icon in Let's say maybe I want to photos on this page, but I want to be a little bit more artistic, so let's see what kind of templates we've got. And maybe let's choose this one where we've got a large picture in a small picture, and then we could click and drag a photo from our photo. Been to customize that page so pretty quickly? You can make some amazing templates in here. So for the sake of time, Uncle Head and leave the rest of these like they are, I want to show you how to scoot pages around. So here, in all pages, view if you want to think about it that way, basically, we've just click this little button here. You can do a couple of different things if I Let's say I want to move just this page page, too, but I don't want to move Page three. All I have to do is click Page two, and then once it's highlighted with that golden color click and drag on the gold, not on the picture, because if you click and drive the picture like French, they think you want to reverse these two boxes because you got two boxes right there. So getting to the good clicking and dragging had its my high. If you want to move the pages around, click and drag in the yellow section, so now I can click and drag and move just that one page and then light room flip flops the positions of those two pages. Now, if I did want to move to pages at a time, let's say who I really like the way these two look together, but I want them. Earlier in my book, I would click to select one and then shift click to select the other one, and then I could scoot that around. Now, if you have a page that is a double page spread, so let's just go ahead and make this one a two page spread. We'll do that once you have a two page spread like that that you'd be created using that template guy like we just did when you click toe activity bait that page both pages or selected automatically because light room assumes that you want to move them together. So then you could click and drag those guys around, so it is tons and tons of fun