Lesson Info
8. Export Print-Ready Files
Lessons
Lesson Info
Export Print-Ready Files
And let's say that we want to take thes three images that I've starred, so we'll go ahead and turn on R rated filter. So now I'm seeing any images that are rated one star or above. Let's say I want to prepare these images to print at the lab of my choice. So there are not any labs that are connected at this time with light room, so you can use whatever lab you want. And I suppose everyone has a different way that they like to do all of this. My method would be to just export finished files to a folder, and then I can send that folder to the lab. So here's how I would do that. I select the images that I want to print, So I just, um, I filtered for them. Select the 1st 1 shift click the Last Orry compressed Commander Control A to get them all selected. And then I'm just gonna export these when you come up to file and I'm gonna choose Export. So what that's going to Dio is light Room's gonna take those three files. Remember that those edits that we did to them. They were very minimal, but...
in some cases you might have bigger edits. But whatever edits we've made to these in the develop module light room will now merge those edits with the file. And that will be the exported piece so the original will stay untouched on our hard drive. The edit instructions will still live in light room, and we will now be making exported edited photos. So we need to tell light room where we want to put those I like to export to a specific folder. So in this case, I'm going to choose the same folder that they came from. So that was in my creativelive. I have a folder called Everything After Pictures and those air from Ah Teoh Day, which oh, in this catalog here. Oops. Where is that folder? Maybe I put it in the wrong. Yeah, let's see. Where is that? I'm going to right click on this image because suddenly I forgot where I put it, and I'm gonna tell it to show me and find her where this is. Oh, and there I see why didn't quite go where I thought I was putting it. It's just in my user folder. It's not exactly where I thought it was. So this is a good learning moment. Good teaching moment. Because if I go through finder and I just drag it somewhere else on my hard drive, light room is going to be confused, because you and though I had a moment where I thought, Oh, I can't find the holder Light room always knows where it is. So what I want to dio is use light room to move that folder to the location that I thought I had put it in to do that, I'm gonna come up here in library view to my folders, and we see that holder right here in light room. So light rooms, looking at that folder on my hard drive. I just need to change this location. So I'm going Teoh, Right. Click on this and let's say update folder location. Now that's not gonna let me move it. Hold on. We'll move it and find her, and then we'll come back to this. This is real life for you, that's for sure. Let's go to this folder in Finder. I'll show you how light room gets confused. Right? So here it isn't finder and now I'm going to move it. So I'm going to make a new finder window so I can see. And I'll put it where I thought it was everything after a folder. Pictures. This is where I thought I had put it. So I'm going to just drag it over there now and we're gonna We're gonna confuse light room, and then we'll fix it. Okay, so now that's been moved. So we should get an error here if I try to open one of these. Come on. Light room. There we go. You see that little exclamation again? That exclamation mark is telling me something's not right. So if I click on it, it says, Oh, they can't find the original file. Would you like to locate it? Yes, I know where I moved it. What happens is light room couldn't find that folder. So I went into finder and I moved it myself. The light room got confused. So what I need to do is go in until light room where I moved it because I basically did that behind light rooms back. So we need to fix it. And this is actually a really good thing, because This is what happens in real life all the time. We move things around and we forget that light room needs to keep track of this stuff. So when this happens to you now, you'll know how to fix it. So I'm going to see here a question mark on this folder, and now I can right click or control Click and I'm going to say Find missing folder. And now I can just navigate right to it. And it's right here and I say, choose and that's it. So now light room fixed it and it reconnected all those links. So you want to keep in mind that the photos were on the hard drive and light rooms, keeping track of them. One of the ways that I like. Teoh, explain this process, which is kind of dated now. But if you grew up before the digital era and you remember going to the library back in the day when we had card catalogs, you used to go to the library, and if you wanted to find a book, you go the card catalogue. Pull out a drawer, the huddle, these cards in it, every book on the shelf was represented by a card in the card catalogue. And that card would tell you where in the library you could actually go and find the physical book. And that's how light room works. So we have this catalog system, Um, and basically what I did was they went behind light rooms back and moved. The photos moved that folder. So it's like if if a kid went into the library and took books off the shelf and then went to somewhere else and put them on a different self, the card catalogue would then be wrong, right? So you'd have toe update the card catalogue. So that's what I did. I just said, Hey, light room when you weren't looking, I moved all those pictures. And now here's the new location. So whenever you're in doubt about that, if you just right click or control click, you can find a lot of the options for renaming things and updating locations and all of that kind of stuff. So now we got it fixed. Okay, so we were gonna export these three things. Eso I've got those images selected and will come up here and go to file export. Choose the folder where we thought they were. And now they actually are. All right, so I'm gonna put them in here. Another option would be, You know, if you plan to Onley, use this folder to sun things for print and maybe you want to delete those images after you print them. Uh, you're believing just that exported file. You could put it on your desktop. So maybe in fact, we can try that. Let's put a folder on our desktop will say new folder, and I'm just going to call it print files and hit, create all hit choose. And so it's going to take these three photos. It's gonna apply the developed edits that we made and it's gonna put them in a folder on the desktop called Print Files. I'm not gonna put a sub folder. Ah, I'm not going to rename anything, so we'll turn that off. Not gonna do anything up here. I just want to make sure I'm exporting J pegs that are of the highest quality. So I'm not going to resize anything. But if I wanted Teoh, I could, um, I can include the metadata or just my copyright or whatever information they choose their, we'll just leave all this stuff alone. I'm gonna go ahead and hit Export. The light room is going to take just a moment and export those three files. And I think my desktop actually clean enough that I can show it to you. We can take a look and see how that looks. There is Oh, desktop. Look at that. It's the only thing on my desktop that never happened. Ah, but here's this folder is called Print Files. If we look inside of it, we see those three images. They've got the edits applied to them and they're ready to be sent off to print somewhere. You'll notice that in preparing them for print, I did not worry about what size I was going to print them. I wasn't thinking, Oh, do I need to crop it to a five by seven or an eight by 10? I didn't do any of that. I just did the edits I wanted and exported it. I would choose the size and the crop that I want when I actually please the order for the photos so that would be handled by the lab or the whatever service I'm using to print those. I'm not gonna worry about it on my computer. I'll send them all my pixels and it will happen on on their side. I don't have to worry about it, So that's really, really all there is to it to preparing those images. So another thing that I like to tell people when you are trying Teoh stay on top of your images is you know, it's a very simple process. You just want to download, make some sort of collection so or key wording or both, so you can find the images later. And then, um, you can share your images Facebook if you want, and and then print them. So whether that's in a book, or maybe every time you download, you just take Star 10 of your favorite photos, throw them in that print folder and send them off to your favorite lab to be printed on. Then you can clear out that print folder, so if I wanted to, I could go back. If I'm really one of those people that, like I can't have anything on my desktop, I could go back to this folder and I could take those images and delete them because I'm not deleting the original. I'm not even deleting the edits I did in light room. I'm just deleting that merged file that has the the original merged with the edit. So that would be used, really only for printed the point, and I could always re export it if I decide I need it later. So if that's the way you do it, then you're using that print folder just more like a holding cell toe. Hold those files before you send them off. So it's with one way to look at it. And then maybe every time when you amass 25 or 50 pictures, maybe then you just order a bunch. So, um, this is a nice way to stay on top of it, so it doesn't get too complicated, and I think the most important thing is just to remember to stick with it. So whatever kind of workflow you're gonna build for yourself, keep it simple. So you actually do it and then just stick with it, and then your hard drive will be nice and clean, and you'll be able to find what you're looking for. So I'm glad you could join us today and give me a shout out and let me know some of your favorite tricks and techniques for organizing your photos. You can find me on social media on Facebook or Instagram, and I'd love to hear from you, so thanks for watching.
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
Thank you Khara Plicanic for being the miracle worker teacher that you are!! I had the Helen Keller at the water pump moment after you clearly explained how to use Lightroom and you did it in less than 45 minutes. You have a refreshing teaching style and I am over the moon happy to have purchased this class. I now have the LR basics down pat. Thank you CL.
hiphotog
I love Khara's teaching style. It's easy to understand and fun. I've enjoyed every class I've taken with her!
Patrick
Thanks very much for your preparation and presentation of helpful information. You seem to be very organized, well spoken and probably a great Mom. Keep up the great work.