Printing Essentials


Ahhh, finally we get to move from just viewing our photos onscreen to actually printing them out. Luckily, Lightroom has about the best printing setup of any program I've ever seen. We're going to start with using one of the built-in printing templates. I'm generally not a big fan of the default templates that ship with any program, but Adobe broke the mold a bit with the templates in the Print module and provided some very useful templatesat the very least, ones that can be easily tweaked to fit your needs. So, we'll start here.

Step One

Printing is done in the Print module, so press Command-4 to switch to the Print module. You don't even have to have a photo selected to enter the Print module, and the reason isyou've got that nice filmstrip across the bottom, so you can choose which photos you want to print right from there. Start by clicking on the Maximize Size template in the Template Browser (as shown), then click on a photo in the filmstrip, and that photo now appears as large as possible on the page to be printed.

©ISTOCKPHOTO/ANDRZEJ BURAK

Step Two

If you want to print more than one photo, press-and-hold the Command key and, in the filmstrip, click on any other photos you want printed (as shown here). As you click on other photos, Lightroom automatically adds pages for you (the number of pages you're printing appears directly below your current photo, so it shows that you're looking at the first page of six to be printed). If you press Command-A (Select All), then it would automatically add as many pages as necessary. To remove a photo from your print selection, Command-click on it in the filmstrip.

Step Three

This is more of a timesaving shortcut than a step, but you know that number of pages appearing under your main photo? Well if you have just a small number of photos set up for printing (like we do here), you can view those pages by using the left and right arrows on either side of the page numbers. However, when you've got a lot of photos, you can jump forward or backward much faster by placing your cursor right over the first number (your cursor will change into a text I-beam cursor) and then click, hold, and drag to the left or right to quickly jump through the page numbers. It makes getting to photo page number 42 much, much faster. Now, back to our story already in progress.

Step Four

Remember when we chose the Maximize Size template? Well, what that template does is it tries to print your photo as large as possible, and to do that it had to turn your photo sideways, so it prints wide, rather than trying to fit on a tall page. So how did it know to do that? Because the option Rotate Photos to Best Fit Cells was turned on. If, instead, you wanted to print your wide photo on a tall page (like the one shown here), you'd go up to the Image Settings panel (top right) and turn off the Rotate Photos to Best Fit Cells checkbox (as shown heremore on this feature later when we get into contact sheets). All right, so far we learned how to print one or more photos, and how to change the photo's orientation on the page. Now, it's resizing time.

Step Five

Before we head straight into the sizing issue, I do want to mention that by default there are two onscreen rulers that appear on the left side and bottom of your photo (as shown here). The default unit of measure is inches, although the bottom side of the ruler is always in centimeters (I have no idea why). If you want to change the top measurement, go to the Page Layout Tools panel, and next to the Show Rulers checkbox, you'll see the word "Inches." Click-and-hold on that word and a pop-up menu of units of measurement appears (as shown here)just choose your desired unit from this menu.

Step Six

By the way, if you find those rulers distracting, you can turn them off (as I have here) by turning off the Show Rulers checkbox in the Page Layout Tools panel. Now, first off, how do we determine how large a print we're going to print? That is actually done not in Lightroom, but in the Page Setup dialog for your printer. Conveniently, Adobe added a Page Setup button (shown circled here) at the bottom of the Panels area on the right side of the window, so click that now and we can set up the size of the paper we want to print on.

Step Seven

Once you click that button, the Page Setup dialog will pop down from the top of Lightroom's window. From the Settings pop-up menu at the top of the dialog, choose Page Attributes. In the Format For pop-up menu, choose your printer (in the dialog shown here, I picked my personal printer, the Epson Stylus Photo R2400, which I think is the best pro-quality 13x19" printer out there). The Paper Size pop-up menu is where you ultimately choose which size paper you'll be printing to, so go ahead and choose that from the menu (here I chose to print 8x10" borderless prints). Also, for orientation, choose Portrait (the first icon from the left) because you can auto rotate your photos to print correctly in Lightroom.

Step Eight

Now click OK, and you're set (you can turn the Rulers on for just a second or two to confirm that, yes indeed, you are printing 8x10s, but that's only necessary if you're fairly paranoid). Now let's get to sizingchoosing how large our photos will appear on our 8x10" prints. There are two ways to do this: The first is to go to the Page Layout Tools panel and use the Margins sliders. As you change the margins, the size of the photo changes to accommodate the new margins. In this instance, I dragged the Top Margins slider to the right a little bit (increasing the top margin) and the top margin moved down. I then dragged the Bottom Margins slider further to the right and you can see how the photo resized (which created lots of space below the photo).

Step Nine

As you move these Margins sliders, the photos resize live onscreen, so you can always see exactly where, and how large, your photo will be. Here I increased the left and right margins (by dragging their sliders to the right), and you can see how it repositioned the image on the page.

Step Ten

Okay, are you ready for a "Gotcha!"? If you drag all of the Margins sliders back to 0 (all the way to the left) your photo doesn't always jump back up to size. Why? I have no idea, but it just doesn't sometimes. So if you decide you want to start over, you may really need to start overgo back over to the Template Browser and click on the Maximize Size template (as shown here). Now your photo is back up to filling as much of your 8x10 as it can. Well, technically, you could fill more of that 8x10, right? Because there are white margins on each side of the image. If you really wanted to fill every square inch, then you could turn on the Zoom and Crop Photos to Fill Grid Cells checkbox at the top of the Image Settings panel.

Step Eleven

When you turn on the Zoom and Crop Photos to Fill Grid Cells checkbox (as shown here), Lightroom zooms in until the photo fills as much of the cell area as possible (in this case, the whole page because you chose the Maximize Size template). Now, once your photo is zoomed in like that, if you move your cursor over the image, your cursor turns into a Grabber Hand (as shown circled here). This lets you click-and-drag to move your image around within the borders of your page (or cell), so you can position it (basically cropping it) just the way you want it. So now that you see how Zoom and Crop works, turn that checkbox off for now.

Step Twelve

The second method of sizing and setting your margins is to just click-and-drag the margins right where you want them. Now, we started with the Maximize Size template and our margins are at the very edge of the page so, for example, if you had a printer that required a 1/4" margin at the top, you'd move your cursor to the very top of the page, and you'd see it change into a bar with two arrows. Just click-and-drag downward and the margin line will appear, and your photo will shrink to accommodate this new height restriction. As you drag, the exact position of this top margin appears in inches (shown circled here) so you can easily see how far you're dragging down. That's pretty darn slick.

Step Thirteen

Here, to add more space at the bottom, grab the bottom margin (which is at the very bottom edge of the page) and drag upward (as shown here). Again, you'll see a measurement as to how far you're dragging up appear right above the margin line as you drag. As you can see here, the photo resizes accordingly.

Step Fourteen

Are you ready for another "Gotcha!"? Okay, so you're dragging the bottom margin upward, the photo is scaling down in size as you drag, and all of a sudden the photo flips over on its side (as shown here). Why is it doing that? It's because the Rotate Photos to Best Fit Cells feature is turned on, and when you dragged upward far enough that the photo would actually be larger if printed sideways, Lightroom automatically flipped it. Depending on how you look at this, this is either utterly brilliant or incredibly annoying. Either way, it's easy to changejust turn off the Rotate Photos to Best Fit Cells checkbox in the Image Settings panel (go ahead and turn that off now, so we can increase the margins and shrink the photo's size a bit more).

Step Fifteen

Now grab the side margins (remember to click-and-drag from the edges) and drag them inward until there's a nice open area below your photo (as shown here).

Step Sixteen

Now that we have that big open area, we can add some text there. In the Panels area on the right, scroll down to the Overlay Options panel, and turn on the Print Identity Plate checkbox. This makes your Identity Plate text visible, as shown here (if you can't see your text, try dragging the Scale slider to the right, as shown here, to make your text bigger. Also, if your text appears in white, choose Edit from the pop-up menu that appears to the right of the Print Identity Plate checkbox. Then highlight your text, click on the Font Panel button to bring up the Font panel, click on the color swatch at the top left, and choose black as your text color).

Step Seventeen

Click-and-drag your Identity Plate text down so it appears under your photo in the open area of space (as shown here). Now, so we can get a good clean look at our photo layout before we print it, go ahead and hide the page margins by turning off the Show Guides checkbox in the Page Layout Tools panel (as shown here).

Step Eighteen

Now remember, although we're setting up this one photo for printing, this layout you just created is also applied to any other photos you have selected. So, go ahead and press Command-A to select all your photos in the filmstrip, then click the right-facing arrow below the center Preview area (as shown here) to move through your group of photos to be printed. As you can see, they each have your custom layout.

Step Nineteen

Click to move on to another photo, and let's tweak things a little while we're here. One thing I like to do with the Identity Plate is to lower the Opacity setting to around 40% (as shown here in the Overlay Options panel), so the text looks gray and doesn't draw as much attention or compete as much with the photo. Another option you might like (depending on the photo and the background) is to have Lightroom automatically add a thin border around your photo. To do that, turn on the Print Other Options checkbox (in the Overlay Options panel) and then turn on the Border checkbox below that (as shown here). If you want the photo's name, caption, date, or EXIF data also printed on the photo, turn on the Print Photo Information checkbox, also in the Overlay Options panel, and turn on the checkboxes below it for the data you want to print.

Step Twenty

Now that we've gone through all this trouble to create a custom layout for our printing, let's save it as a template so the next time we want this exact same layout, it's just one click away. Below the Template Browser on the left side of the window, click the Add Template button (as shown here), which adds a template to the list with the text field already highlightedjust type in the name you want. Now, we're ready to print (well, once we tweak a few settings, anyway).

Step Twenty-One

Before we actually hit the Print button, there's a couple of controls you'll want to adjust in the Print Job Settings panel. First, there's the Print Resolution setting. The default resolution is 240 dpi, but you can raise or lower that amount by clicking directly on the number and dragging your mouse to the left or right (240 dpi is fine for printing an 8x10 to a color inkjet printer). In the Color Management section, for Profile, ideally you'd want to load a profile of the exact paper you're going to be printing on (download these from the paper manufacturer's web-site). If you've downloaded the printing profiles from the Web (they're free), click-and-hold where it says Managed by Printer and a pop-up menu will appear. Choose Other from this menu.

Step Twenty-Two

A Printing Profile dialog will pop down from the top of Lightroom's window. Click on the pop-up menu in this dialog and a list of your installed printing profiles will appear. I'm printing to an Epson Stylus Photo R2400, and I'm printing on Epson's Premium Luster paper, so I downloaded and installed Epson's free profiles (the installation only took a double-clickit does the rest for you). Now the SPR2400 PremiumLuster profile appears in my profile list (as shown here). By choosing this, you're letting Lightroom manage your color, instead of your printer (which is what you want). If you want the best results from your printing, you'll definitely want to download, install, and use these profiles.

Step Twenty-Three

For the Rendering Intent, if you're printing to a color inkjet printer (and I imagine that you are), I recommend choosing Perceptual from the pop-up menu (as shown here) because it seems to give the most consistent color.

Step Twenty-Four

We're going to skip Draft Mode printing for now (we'll talk about that in the Contact Sheet section), but we can discuss Print Sharpening. This is a modified Unsharp Mask that you can add if you feel your images need additional sharpening. The Low setting (the default) works pretty well for images 8x10" or smaller, but if you're printing larger images, you'll probably need to use Medium (for 13x19") or High (for 16x20" or larger). You choose these by turning on the Enable Print Sharpening checkbox, and then clicking directly on the word Low and a pop-up menu appears (as shown here). Okay, we're almost done. Click the Print button that appears under the Print Job Settings panel.

Step Twenty-Five

When the Print dialog appears, choose your printer from the Printer pop-up menu at the top of the dialog (here I've chosen my Epson R2400 again).

Step Twenty-Six

From the third pop-up menu down, choose Print Settings (shown circled here) to make the printing options visible. (The choices on this menu may vary depending on your printer, so if you don't have Print Settings, look for the menu or menus that will allow you to make the following choices.) For Media Type, choose the exact paper you're going to be printing on (if you don't see your paper here, you probably haven't gone to Epson's, or your paper manufacturer's, website and downloaded the profile for your paper). For Mode, choose Advanced, and for Print Quality choose the highest quality your printer will allow. Don't click the Print button quite yetthere's one more dialog to go.

Step Twenty-Seven

Again, from the third pop-up menu down, choose Color Management, and then turn your printer's color management off (as shown here). This is critically important, because you've chosen to have Lightroom manage your color. If you let Lightroom manage it one way, and then also let your printer manage it another, there's almost no chance that what you see onscreen and what comes out of the printer will match. The key to color management is consistency, so you'll need to turn your printer's color management off, as shown here.

Step Twenty-Eight

Now you can click the Print button, and as long as you started out with a calibrated monitor, and you followed the steps shown here (including downloading and installing the proper profiles), then what you see in print will match what you saw onscreen, and life is good.



The Adobe Lightroom eBook for Digital Photographers
The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers
ISBN: B001FA0MWK
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 71
Authors: Scott Kelby

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