Lightroom Killer Tips for Your Slideshow
From the book
From the book
Draft Mode Speeds Things Up
Nothing’s worse than sitting there waiting for high-res previews to draw while you’re working on your slide show, so Adobe introduced a draft mode that lets you quickly see a preview of your slide show without having to wait for the images to render. Choose this from the Quality pop-up menu at the bottom of the Playback panel. There are three quality choices: Draft (super fast), Standard (regular speed), and High (this might take a minute). Remember, these are just quality settings for while you’re previewing the slide show here in Lightroom. When you export the slide show it’s always exported using High Quality.
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Turn Off the “Effects”
Want to see your slide show without all the fancy stuff (music sync, pan and zoom, random order options)? Just click on Manual (at the top of the Playback panel) and it turns it all off until you click Automatic again.
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Preview How Photos Will Look in Your Slide Show
On the far-right side of the toolbar that appears under the center Preview area, you’ll see some text showing how many photos are in your current collection. If you move your cursor over that text, your cursor turns into a scrubby slider, and you can click-and-drag left or right to see the other photos in your slide show appear in your current slide show layout (it’s one of those things you have to try, and then you’ll dig it).
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What Those Rotate Arrows Are For
If you look down in the toolbar, you’ll see two rotation arrows, but they’re always grayed out. That’s because they’re not for rotating photos, they’re for rotating any custom text you create (you add custom text by clicking on the ABC button in the toolbar).
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A Better Start to Your Slide Show
When you make a slide show presentation for a client, before the client is in front of your monitor, start the slide show, and as soon as it appears onscreen, press the Spacebar to pause it. Now when your client sits in front of the screen, they don’t see your first photo—they see a black screen (or your title screen). When you’re ready to begin your presentation, press the Spacebar again and your slide show starts.
Detailed Slide Design
Although you can create your slide shows from scratch in Lightroom, there’s nothing that says that you have to design your slides in Lightroom. If there are things you want to do that you can’t do in Lightroom, just build the slides over in Photoshop, save them as JPEGs, then re-import the finished slides into Lightroom, and drop those into your slide show layout, add your background music, etc.
Collections Remember Which Template You Used Last
The Collections panel also appears in the Slideshow module (which you learned about in this chapter). If you click on a collection and select just a few photos in that collection for your slide show (and change the Use pop-up menu to Selected Photos in the toolbar at the bottom of the Preview area), and use them to set up a slide show, you probably want to be able to save that slide show so you don’t have to go through all that again. Well, you can. Just Right-click on the collection, and choose Create Slideshow from the pop-up menu, or click on the Create Saved Slideshow button at the top right of the Preview area. This creates a new collection with just the photos you used in that particular slide show, in the right order, along with the template, so when you want that exact same slide show again (same look, same photos, same order), you’re one click away.
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