As an amateur photographer, I’m always looking for the perfect application that will allow me to manage my photo collection. By perfect, I mean an application that allows easy (or detailed) adjustment tools, a way to organize my photos by keyword, and good print support. I like to print two photos per page if possible, since that reduces paper usage and allows me to stick the sheet in a portfolio or binder very easily.
Since taking possession of my MacBook Pro, I’ve had the opportunity to try the trial versions of Apple Aperture and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but this article will focus on the printing functionality of Lightroom alone. I will detail Aperture’s functionality in another post.
Lightroom has a very flexible print module. It allows you to create templates for various print layouts. You an do the same with the Web module, defining your own web templates to upload to your web site. By default, Lightroom has a very limited set of print templates - mostly contact sheet and full sheet-specific. But with a little customization, you can define your own template for printing photos at home.
Click below to follow along with a short tutorial on setting up a simple Lightroom print template.
Update: I just checked the settings again on LR 1.4.1 and it does not accept 0.13 as right/left values. Try setting the values at left 0.25, right 0.25, top 0.25, bottom 0.56, and make sure to set the cell size height to 5 and the cell size width to 7. This will produce the correct template. Thanks Julia!
Lightroom is composed of modules. These modules represent the different actions you can take against your digital photos. The module we’ll work with is the Print module. For this tutorial, we’ll work with two images.
Select the images you want to print. The default preview will show the first selected image occupying the entire printed page.
Now, we’ll start to create our template. Click the “Add” button in the left template panel. This will create a new template with the a name in the template list. Click the label to rename it, and use a descriptive name that so you can remember what the template does at a quick glance.
Next, we’ll focus on the right-hand panels. The first is Image Settings. These settings affect the appearance of the image when it’s printed on the page. Check the “Zoom to Fill Frame” and “Auto - Rotate to Fit” checkboxes - this tells Lightroom to zoom the image to fill the entire area we will define, and rotate the image so that it fits the orientation of the paper. If you want an outline printed around your images, check the “Stroke Border” checkbox and set the line with and colour accordingly.
Next, the real meat of the template - the layout. The Layout panel is located under the Image Settings panel, and directly affects how the print areas are defined. I chose to operate with Inches as the unit - if you have another preference, the settings I’m using will need to be adjusted accordingly.
If you are in a hurry, you can just copy the settings as shown in the image at left and be done with it. Otherwise, follow along as I explain what each setting does. The first section to change is the “Page Grid” section - this defines how image will appear on the page when they are contained in a grid layout. Set the “Rows” slider to “2″, which means there will be two rows on the page. Leave the “Columns” slider at “1″. So, we end up with one column with two rows. Great. If we look at the preview, we see there are now two boxes appearing on the page, but the size and spacing are off, so let’s make some more adjustments.
In the “Cell Size” section, click the numeric value at the far right of the “Height” line. Enter “5″, then click on the numeric value on the “Width” line. Enter “7″ here. Now, the preview should show two boxes, one on top of the other, each 5×7 in size. To decrease the amount of space between the images, click the numeric value to the right of the “Vertical” line in the “Cell Spacing” section, and enter “0.20″. Next, we’ll play with the margins. In the margins section, enter “0.13″, “0.13″, “0.40″, “0.40″ for Left, Right, Top and Bottom respectively. Now, the preview should show two boxes, one on top of the other, each 5×7 in size, and nicely spaced on the page.
Once you’ve made the adjustments, you can assign them to the template you created a few minutes ago. Right-click on the template name that you created, and select the “Update With Current Settings” menu item. NOTE: Be careful not to Left-Click on any other template, or the adjustments you just made will be lost. You will have to re-enter the adjustment values. This is one quirk of the template functionality.
One final option is to remove the identity text that appears between the images. To remove the text, simply uncheck the “Identity Plate” checkbox in the “Overlays” section to remove the watermark. If you want to add some text between images, check the same box and update the values of the “Overlays” panel accordingly.
By now, you should have a new template defined! It should show two 5×7 images, evenly spaced on a page, ready for printing! You can add another template for landscape printing, or if you want to display two 4×6 images instead.
I hope this tutorial was useful to you. If you would like to see other tutorials or have input related to this tutorial, leave a comment or email me.
