Lightroom is fastly becoming a valuable tool for photographers. Used in the right way its suggested workflow can provide everything you could possibly need to catalogue, develop, print and publish your images.
Up until recently I had predominantly utilised Adobe Lightroom for its cataloguing. I found it far friendlier to use than Adobe’s long standing Bridge application with its ability to create collections, keyword and meta tagging and various filters.
These functions allow you to quickly compile your final selections from a shoot and using loope view scan through to make your top selections. All brilliant until you forget the all important component in the shoot. The client.
In this guide I will walk through how using the contact sheet features in the Print module of Lightroom can turn this application into the most valuable asset to your photo workflow.
Getting your shots to the client
Exporting all your images to send to your client can result in serious headaches. You may be sending just a handful of snaps, you could be sending hundreds. In the case of the latter you could be looking at having to pump out 30 odd emails with up to five 4MB images attached at a time.
Not only could this take forever to put together there is always the possibility of your clients mail exchange eventually giving up and falling over or telling you to get knotted regardless.
It can also make it tricky to keep a track of what you have and have not sent. Lightroom has just the right tool for this very occassion.
Lightroom Print module
Lightroom is broken into a series of modules. Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, Web. This has been set in a logical workflow sequence for processing your images.
Lightrooms module list is easy to navigation and creates a logical workflow
In this example we are going to skip Developing entirely, ignore the Slideshow features and head straight for the Print module of the program.
Opening up the module we are greeted with Lightroom’s wonderful presets in the left sidebar. Expanding the Template Browser tab we can see there are several options for contact sheets, initially 4×5 and 5×8. you can of course creating your own templates to suit your specific needs or desires.
Lightroom has a bounty of print templates available out the box
First I selected all my images from the preview bar at the bottom of the screen (select first image then ctrl+a on PC or apple+a on Mac) then choose the 4×5 contact sheet option from the template browser.
I now have 3 pages with all my selected images displayed.
contact sheet in lightroom
Applying a little bit of savvy, I select from the Overlays features – found in the right sidebar, Photo info and set its mode to sequence. this provides a number sequence to all my images. Having these numbers in place makes it even easier for my client to be able to tell me exactly what shots they would like to see larger versions of.
Under the Print Job tab I have also set it to draft mode. this is to keep the file size down.
Sequential number of images set across the contact sheet(s)
Signed Sealed and Delivered
There are now two options before I send these sheets off to the client. Being that this is the print module the most obvious would be to simply hit the print button, run the batch off and post them over.
Sadly today’s society doesn’t appreciate the written word and simply do not have the patience to wait for such a decision making tool at the evil mitts of Royal Mail.
Instead I print to PDF. There are many free and pay for print to PDF tools available on the market. Almost all of these create a printer just like your Epson or HP for you to choose from and instead of putting ink to paper create a spangly PDF.
I personally have been using PrimoPDF for several years. It is free to download and very easy to use.
There are a few things to think about. The first is file size. The main thing I want to ensure is that the file is small enough to email whenever possible. What I don’t want however is to lose quality on the images as this could make choosing the right ones difficult.
Finding the balance between these two is a little trial and error. My advice is to keep tweaking the DPI to improve the image quality on the PDF but keeping an eye on the file size whilst doing so.
In this instance I confess that due to the high number of images (60 approx) and wanting high quality (250DPI) I ended up with a 98MB PDF file.
Fortunately I have an FTP facility for my clients and was able to send them details to download the file for review.
Why are contact sheets so important?
When you are working with a client who needs to preview shots that are going to be used, you don’t want to spend days on end developing and perfectly 100′s of shots when they may only want 1. By taking just a few minutes out to provide then with a contact sheet you could be saving yourself hours of time which may be ‘off the clock’.
