The Adobe

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Chapter 6 Sharing Your Photos Onscreen

The Adobe Lightroom eBook for Digital Photographers

Customizing

the Look of

Your Slides

The defaults are okay, but after you create a slide show or two with them, you’re

going to be saying stuff like, “I wish I could change the background color” or

“I wish I could add some text at the bottom” or “I wish my slide show looked

better.” (Note: You’re not saying you wish your photos looked better—you wish

your slide show looked better.) Well, this is where you start to create your own

custom look for your slides, so it looks just the way you want it, every time.

Step One:

Once the photos you want in your

slide show are in place, now it’s time

to focus on the look of your slide show.

Lightroom comes with several pre-

designed templates, and you can apply

any of them by just clicking on them in

the Template Browser on the left side of

the Lightroom window (as shown here,

where I’ve clicked on the Default tem-

plate, which puts your photos over a gray

background with a thin white border

and a hard drop shadow, and makes your

Identity Plate appear in the upper-left

corner. More on this later).

Step Two:

If you move your cursor over each tem-

plate name in the Template Browser,

you’ll see a preview (up in the preview

window above the Template Browser) of

how a slide in your slide show will look if

you use that particular template. Besides

the Grid view, there’s also a Slide view so

you can see your slide layouts up close.

To switch to Slide view, either double-

click on a slide, or click the Slide button

(shown circled here). Once in Slide view,

click on the EXIF Metadata template to

put your photo on a black background

with your photo’s metadata printed

below it.

103Chapter 6Sharing Your Photos Onscreen

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The Adobe Lightroom eBook for Digital Photographers

Step Three:

If you decide that you’d prefer to create

your own custom look for your slides,

rather than using Adobe's templates,

then you might as well tuck the Template

Browser out of sight so you have a larger

work area. To do that, just click once on

the far-left side of Lightroom’s window

(as shown) and the panel will tuck itself

away. Look how much larger your work

area is now, and all the essential adjust-

ment panels are still on the far-right side

of the window. Now, let’s get to custom-

izing your look.

Step Four:

To create your own custom look, you

can use the current template as a start-

ing place (if you like), or you can switch

to a different template and use that (if

you move your cursor to the left side of

the screen, your Template Browser will

pop back out). For our example here,

we’ll just use that EXIF Metadata tem-

plate as a starting place to customize our

slide show. First, let’s look at sizing your

photos on the slide (basically, determin-

ing how large your photos will appear).

You do this by clicking-and-dragging on

the margin grid lines that appear around

your photo. If you click-and-drag inward,

it shrinks your photo (as shown here).