How to Create a Novelty Slideshow Template in Lightroom 2
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Photo slideshows don't have to be a yawn. Martin Evening shares a technique he devised for creating a slideshow template in Lightroom 2 with an "old-fashioned TV" look for a series of black-and-white shots. You can apply this trick in zillions of different ways to suit your own slideshows.
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How to Create a Novelty Slideshow Template in Lightroom 2
I devised this series of steps to show you some of the potential Lightroom has for creating customized slideshow layouts.
- First I used my Photoshop skills to create a cutout image of an old-fashioned television set on top of a table (see Figure 1). I won't go into all the details about how I created this object, but I'd like to draw your attention to the screen area in the middle: Although you can't see this too well against the checkered transparency pattern, it contains soft highlight reflections. The insert image on the left shows this reflection more clearly against a black background.
- In Photoshop, I went to the Image menu and used the Image Size dialog box to resize the master image to the size shown in Figure 2, which would be the maximum needed for a slideshow presentation on a 30-inch display.
- Meanwhile, I selected a suitable backdrop photo in Lightroom, which in this case was a photograph of a wallpaper design. I used the Post-Crop Amount and Midpoint sliders in the Develop module's Vignettes panel to burn in the corners of this photograph (see Figure 3).
- In the Slideshow module, I dragged the wallpaper photo from the Filmstrip to place it as a background image in the Backdrop panel (see Figure 4).
- To load the foreground image that I had worked on in Photoshop, I clicked the triangle in the Overlays panel's Identity Plate preview (circled in Figure 5) and chose Edit. This action opened the Identity Plate Editor shown in Figure 6. I checked the "Use a graphical identity plate" option, clicked the Locate File button, and chose the image I had worked on in Photoshop. Don't worry about the warning in the Preview window about images being no more than 57 pixels tall. Just click OK and save this as a new Identity Plate setting.
- The Identity Plate image appears as a new overlay, with the photo selected in the Filmstrip sandwiched between the backdrop image and the Identity Plate overlay. The first stage here was to place and scale the Identity Plate image so that it almost filled the whole of the screen and was centered in the frame, as shown in Figure 7.
- I adjusted the Layout panel guides to position the photo frame so that the height of a landscape photograph would just fit within the top and bottom of the TV screen area. I also set the left and right guides so that any extra narrow landscape photos would still fit the frame height. Figure 8 shows the result.
Figure 9 shows a slide from the finished slideshow, in which selected photos were played back via this television screen slideshow template.
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