Hi guys, Yanik here for Yanik Photo School, for another great video tutorial. Today we’re going to be going back to Lightroom, and giving Photoshop a break before the holidays, and going back to my favorite software for image editing and image sorting, Lightroom.
And today, I’m going to be doing something different. The previous tutorials were all into develop module, where we actually retouched some photos, this time we’re going to show off our photos. We’re going to create a web gallery for our photos that we can show off to friends, family or even clients. All right, here I am in my library module, I want to skip over to the web module which is the last one on the list here, on the top right corner. Going to click on that, and you’re going to see by default, it’s going to start loading the pictures that I chose, I chose a couple of pictures down here, 9 photos. And it’s creating the web gallery for me right now.
By default, it’s putting a slash template, which is this one here flash gallery default. And basically you have your thumbnails here, the image here, and it’s a great flash gallery. You can see it live how it’s going to transition the images on the web. Now you can choose other galleries, just by hovering over the various Lightroom templates that are already integrated into Lightroom. And you’ll see the thumbnail on the top left appear. At the bottom sometimes, will say HTML, or it’ll have an F, F for flash, and of course, HTML is HTML coding. If we go to the right side, this is where the fun stuff begins. Now we want to put some details here, and the first thing we want to do is put a site title. Now let’s call this “Calgary Shoot”. And you can see it appear right here. And we can add our collection title if you want, to that, and I can call it “Fashion”. And it appears on the right side. You can add a collection and description but it won’t show on the template itself, it’s more for you to know exactly. Give you more details on that collection.
Contact info either be your company name or your own name. So, I can put down my name here, and I can have a link to my name. I can either put an email address or a website. If I put a website, I’ll start with triple w, and put the website. If I want to put an email address, I need to know to add mail to: and then without any spaces, put in your email address. And there you go. So, when you’re going to be linking, people are just going to click on that, and it’ll open up their mail software and they’ll be able to send you and email.
Next down is the color palette box. And in here, you can actually customize the whole colors of this gallery. I like it as it is, I think it’s really professional, it makes the pop, I like those dark grays and black. But if you want, you can always go into each color and pick a palette here. And if you want to add colors, you can click, let me just do that, I’m clicking a bit faster on this big icon here, not clicking anymore, here we go, we’re getting some colors here. And you can choose any color you want. You can see the headers changing right now, but I like it black so I’ll leave it at black. And you can do that with all the colors in there.
Moving down, if you didn’t put a title up here, and you’d rather put an identity plate, you just need to check this box. Your title will disappear, and it will be replaced by your identity plate. Now, you have to have loaded up your identity plate in Lightroom for this to work. Now, to load your identity plate, all you need to do is go into edit and the last one down is identity plate set up. And you can either custom or you can write your own text in here for your identity plate. I basically loaded my own here by clicking on locate file, and then I found my plate, and put it there, and then I click Ok. And that’s how you get your identity plate. I always like to put my identity plate up because it’s all about branding. You want people to know who you are. Now next thing we can play with is the image size. You can choose small, medium, large, or extra large. I usually keep mine large. I think it shows really well on the web. And thumbnails, I always keep them large as well, what you see now are the large thumbnails. Into the image info box, now in your library module let me go back there for a second you have the option on the right side here, to add titles and captions to your images.
Now of course, if you haven’t put any titles or captions on your images, whether you checked in the web module or not, nothing will show up. But if you did put some information that you want clients of people to see, it’s important that you put it in your library module, and then going back into your web module, all you need to do is check them and you’ll see them appear. Reload the gallery, and you’ll see them appear here. Got your title there, and you got your caption right underneath. So, it’s your choice whether or not you want them to show. But you have that option there, which is pretty cool.
Going down to the second to the last box, is the output settings. Now, first one is the image quality slider. I played with it a bit and I found that for my taste. 70% quality gave the best result for me, and what I want my clients to see in terms of quality. You can play with it and test it out, and you’ll see what’s best for you.
Now, what’s also very interesting is that you can add a copyright watermark on your image. Now again, if you haven’t entered copyright information in your library module, it won’t show. I’ll show you where in the library module you’ll find this, it’s way at the bottom down here, copyright information. As you can see, my name is down there. So going back to the web gallery, if I click on that, it should appear at the bottom left of each image. And there you go, Yanik Chauvin just appeared there.
If you want to add some sharpening to your image, you can do it. I always keep it on, and keep it on standard, but you can always put it on low or high, or just uncheck it and not put any sharpening if you’ve already sharpened your image, either in Lightroom or in Photoshop. And what’s also very cool, if you’ll look at this last box, you can actually upload your photos in your photo gallery directly from Lightroom straight on to your server. All you need to do is click on the upload button, and it’ll ask you for some information if you’ve already put it there, right now it’s only asking for my password. But if you can always set up by clicking on custom settings edit, and then you can put your server name, user name and password, etc. etc and it’ll like directly on to your server. Isn’t that cool? You don’t even need to export anything, it’ll just upload it straight there. I prefer to export it myself, reason is that I catalogue it and I keep it catalogued in a specific folder, and I’ve been doing that since before Lightroom, so I kind of got that habit in to me and I keep it that way. So, if you want to export that folder with the whole gallery in it, just click on export, go to wherever you want to export it on your computer, and then export that folder there, and all you need to do after that is upload the whole folder on to your server, and the job is done.
Now if you want to preview your gallery in a browser, all you’ll need to do is click on this button and on the bottom left to what you call preview and browser. Now it’s going to take a few minutes to load, because it’s rendering the preview, and depending on the amount of images you got in there, it might take awhile. Now you can see the progress bar up here going, so we’re right around 70% now, we’re almost done you can even see the little thumbnail of the image of where it’s at. And in a second we’ll be done, it loads your default browser, and you can see the web gallery here. And you can play with your images here you can see the nice transition. My identity plate is there, my title, my name, if I click on that my email browser will show up, and you have all the images here, my copyright’s there.
And there you go, that’s how you do a web gallery in Lightroom 2.0. I hope you enjoyed this video tutorial, and we’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.
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