Lessons

Lesson Info

3:45 pm - Lightroom® 4: Book Module

The last thing I wanted to go into was a little bit about the book module. We can't skip the book module. It's It's definitely a great new addition now to work in the book module. I generally would start in the library module putting to pulling together a collection of photos that I'm gonna build a book on. So I'm not gonna take the time to really do that now. So we'll say that I'm gonna build a book with this entire Victoria folder of photos. I might put some thought into arranging these photos in at least a preliminary order that I think I might want to see them in the book. I can always change the order later in the book module, but it just, you know, the library modules just great for doing that kind of organisational work. Then, with the folder or collection selected or highlighted here in the filmstrip, I'll go to the book module, and the book module will allow you to make blurb books and also pdf's so you can output pdf. So too put on your IPad to share with people. Um, if other...

book manufacturers support the sizes here that you can output to, then you may be able to send them to other book manufacturers as well. I'm really not sure about that. So once I'm in the book module, I'm basically seeing this preview window of my book. I'm gonna go ahead and start here by specifying whether I want a blur book or a Pdf as my final output. Let's build a blur book, and I've got the sizes in here. That blurb offers. I've got different kinds of covers that I can have soft cover in the trap dust jacket, different paper types, whether I want the blurb logo on the last page, which you might say, Well, why would anyone want the blurb logo? Well, first of all, they make great quality books, and second, you do get a price break and light Room is even telling you based on these settings here, what the price is gonna be. So that's great. You don't even have to go out to the to the Web For that. You can go to the blurb website with this. Learn more button. You can start your book with auto layout, or you can just start from scratch on your own. Let's do a quick auto layout just to get something started. I'm just going to click on auto layout and Light Room has already built a book here. Let's see, let's go ahead and make thes thumbnail smaller so you can seem or of this book As I scroll up here. You'll see that it's set right now to have one photo on the right hand side and no photos on the left hand side. Very clean. Classic. Look, now you can. The reason it has laid it out this way is auto layout is using that particular preset. But you can edit this preset to have whatever layouts you want be part of that auto layout functionality. We can start with this and and modify it from here. Or we can clear this layout and just build a book from scratch. So I'm gonna go ahead and build a book from scratch. We'll start with the cover now. Right now, I'm in grid view and the shortcut. I want to get to two page spread view. I've got icons down here to get to those You're ready for shortcuts. Command E. What is this? Is there just took a sec there. I thought I was wrong again. So Okay, so command e will get you to two page spread as well. And so I'm going to start What is going on here? Okay. With the cover. So for the cover, I'm gonna click on the cover, and I'm gonna choose a layout for the cover. So there are lots of layouts built in here. And when you see a gray with a plus, that means a photo. So in this particular layout, I've got a photo spanning both the front, the back cover and then lines of text, you know, text boxes on top of that. So let's go ahead and go with a different cover here. We'll go with there's so many choices. I'm just go with this one here, and each gray box is is for a photo so I can take a photo, and I can drag it in to that thumbnail. So I'm gonna make this really quick, so I'm going to do command Data Select are gonna come to the filmstrip command A Okay, it's not working there, so I'll click, shift, click. And I'm just gonna drag all the photos and just so that we have some some things quickly filling this out just to show you the potential and then these air text boxes So I can say Victoria Victoria, British Columbia. I'm sure I could come up with a better title than that, but that's great. I'm going to select the text, so I click to select it, and I'm gonna come down to the type panel and change the size of the type. And that will change the color, maybe to a dark grey instead of a black click out of that. Now, I didn't promise you were gonna end up with an attractive book within the this 15 minutes, so I'm not going to sweat that. But I am going to come in here and just go ahead and take this. Take that a second line, make this a little bit bigger, and I want to bring this text down a little bit. Well, when I'm in a so whether it's a photo cell or a text cell, I can change the padding on it. So I'm gonna unlike the padding here, You know, my goal in this really is just to show you how much functionality is in here. You know, I'm obviously going really fast in terms of trying to explain all of the details of the how to. But you have so many options in here to to format things and to get them exactly as you like them down on the type panel. I can also change the font. I can change the spacing between lines. There's a lot of sophistication in here. I could come down into this box type in my name, whatever else I would want to put on the cover. There may be more about the vacation on the back cover here, but let's go ahead and go to our next two page spread here and let's add a photo into here right now. I can see that this page format is the photo is going to take up the whole page. That's what the gray box means, so I can click and drag to put that in there. If I right now, it's cropping off part of the photo and actually, I think that looks great. But if I wanted to see the whole photo, I could click on the zoom slider and zoom out can also right click say's him to fill or seem to fit so that I'm not cropping cropping part of the photo off. We'll go to the next two page spread here. Now I need to add a new page. It's only got one page in here so will come up to the page panel. Add a page and let's put let's keep this one blank and move on to Page three and change the format. Let's put four photos on a page. When I click on this, there's like, I don't know, 160 or more page formats in here for your photos, photos and or text So I can go to the four photos section, for example, and choose from a whole bunch of different formats for photos and or text. So great I'm gonna choose this one here, and then I will simply click and drag photos into the book. And again, I'm not paying attention, which photos air going where, in terms of how attractive it may be, But it's hard to make Victoria unattractive. It's a beautiful place. If I change my mind and I want to swap a couple photos, I'll just click and drag this photo put it there. I can swap him out. Let's see. Let's go ahead and add another page. Change the page format on that To two photos, Maybe to the Alice. Just will do these two photos. Put this one here and all this. Go ahead and put this one back in here is well right. Questions. At this point, I'm gonna go ahead and show you. You know, a few more features in here is well, but I feel like I'm just doing all the talking here. One of the questions was Do you have to be online to use the book module? I don't believe you have to be online. Teoh actually use the module. You certainly to hit the send book to Blur Button, you would have to be online. But that's an interesting question, because I know that we have the price up here, and I would think that it would have to regularly check that, so I'm not 100% sure. Maybe this price functionality just doesn't work When you're not online. There is a way to find out. Testing. Yeah, uh, in case a question from Don in Louisiana, after using the print module to create contact sheets. How can I bring those contact shapes into my pages in the book module without leaving later? Well, I was gonna be fine answering into said without leaving light room. But no, you could do you need so you can do it. You can do it. What? You What you would do is in the print module, you would create your contact sheet. So where's the contact sheet here? It doesn't really matter. I guess you would create your contact sheet and then you would choose down in the print job panel here to print not to your printer, but to printed J. Peg. Okay, You print this out to a J peg, and then you would do an import in the library module of that JPEG, and then you would bring that into the book module. But I would encourage you before you do that. You may have a specific context design that's customized and that you would want to do that for, but I do want to point out that here in the book module in the page formats will look a page formats for this page that you've got multiple photo layouts that look like contact sheets. Right? So we have We have grids here. So that is, you know, is an option that's already built in doesn't require that that work around. You can also put captions and titles underneath or above, or on your photos that you've entered in the library module. So by taking the time to add that information in, I can choose to include that on these pages and specify where, where that caption or title should show up. Sam Cox asks, Can I create my own book module page layouts or edit the ones provided by light room? Not at this point, no, now, But I've got it, I've gotta believe. I mean, we've already got 100. I don't know 150 or how many that that this is. This is probably just the starting place. I mean, I could just imagine I mean, I can imagine where I'd like to see this go in terms of all the different, you know, even more options being built in. And I'm sure I'm not sure. I really have no idea whatsoever, but I would imagine that that adobe, um, would be looking at that as well. Cool. one more question from Roraima. Can you make a double page photo? Was that one of the Yeah, let's do that. So I'm gonna go to add another page here, and I'm gonna go to the next two page spread. Actually, I better add. There we go. So on this page here, I'm gonna click on the drop down, and I'm gonna choose to page spreads. It just impresses me how much they've already built in Teoh Light Room for with this. So I think again that that's that partnership that great partnership between adobe and blurb that has made this happen. So you've got various two page spread formats here. Can fill the two pages. You can You can leave some some. Ah, some space blank over there, etcetera. Let me show you a few additional features again. Just for you to think about, um, you can change the background on your pages. I tend to, like, kind of a clean white background a lot of times, but actually, I'm just gonna point this out because see this exclamation point. This means that, um, the photo is not large enough. They're warning me that they're not enough pixels in this photo to printed high quality that large. So that's what that means. So I would want to use a higher resolution photo if I was going to do a two page spread like this. Okay, I'm gonna go up to my previous page here just to show you that you can change background, color and graphics. You could do it on one page. You could do it on every page. So let's say, for example, only on this page that I want to change the background color. I'll uncheck. Apply background globally. Click on the background color here, click on the square and I could make it as garish auras. There is tasteful as I wanted to you could again. You could do that on every page or just one page. They're graphics built in here is well, so if I click on this, let me show you. OK, graphics built in here is well, so there's a travel on wedding section, so we'll choose. See, you got some wedding. Um, graphics and travel graphics will choose one of the travel graphics, Turn off this background color, and if I increase the opacity, you'll see that I've got that in the background Now again, you could do it on one page. You could have different ones on each page. Do the same one on on every page. So a lot of flexibility here. Last thing I want to show you and I'll get get to your question is that you can drag photos in to be the background so I can put this photo in Is the background. I don't want to drag it into the cell there. I actually need to drag it over to here. There we go. And I could change the opacity on that. So there's, you know, there's a There's for me as a beginner book builder. It's like there's an overwhelming number of things I could do almost. But, you know, that's why I like that. If I want Teoh, I could start with an auto layout and then I can make some some changes from there. So I don't have to be a graphic graphic designer and have lots of ideas on on how to lay it out. Question. Okay, right. Have you played wrong with using Ah the pdf layouts and cranking out an e book version of these book layouts or anything like that, so you could distribute to your friends with IPADS or whatever other type of devices. I haven't played with it yet myself, but I'll show you what's involved here. But first, let me say that for a Blur book before he hit the center toe send book to Blur Button, I would want to print this out myself and do a proof, even on just regular paper. You know, I need to see it visually in front of me to feel comfortable. So when you choose Blur book in the top, right in the bottom left here, I would click on Export Book to PdF. Now I consider this export book to pdf button to be a proof button, so that's not what you're asking. But I wanted Teoh to point that out. For people that are doing blurb books, you want to do a pdf as your final output. So up in the top right, I would choose PdF. And when you do that, you get different choices up here. You still have sizes. You're limited to these sizes, but you also get resolution J peg quality sharpening choices that will help you define that us in a size that's appropriate for, you know, an IPad versus tip to send out to print. So and when you do that when you choose, pdf here in the top, right? You actually, the export book to pdf button has moved down here to the bottom, right, So, so exciting. I wish I could show you more of it. But, you know, again, that's where you gotta tell creative life that you want. You want a workshop on the output modules, But, um, I think at this point, I am going t wrap it up there some other small What? I would consider small changes or given that we're out of time, toe light room for on my block, I've got a what's new and light room four posts. You'll see it in the right side bar. You can go there for some of the additional changes that I haven't had time to cover. But I think, frankly, that I've talked enough, and it's probably time for me to pass this pass the mic back to you guys. Well, it's been amazing. You just showed so much information with all of us and thanks everyone for being here with us, and I just wanted toe. But you know what? Some people out there in on the Internet saying California says this workshop has been one big time saving tip love fest for me and then Tina Leanne Photo learning so much from at light room underscore Laura on creativelive. These tips are going to set save me tons of time and editing. So people really have gotten so much out of these last three days. And if you want to share your thanks for Laura Goto a creative life Facebook page and say thank you there and also on Twitter with hashtag Laura. Thanks. And let's be nice for big global round applause. Thank you, Laura.