Design Center Tutorial
Presentation possibilities in the Slideshow module, part 3: Playback and export
Playing and exporting
When you complete your show, you can try it out. Clicking the Play button at the bottom of the central work area plays it in the work area—all the panels are still visible. Clicking Play under the right panel plays the show over the whole screen—nothing is visible except the slideshow, as shown in Figure 1. In the case of the Play button, the show starts from the active slide selected in the Filmstrip. If you want the show to start from the beginning, click the first button in the playback controls to return to the start of the images, and then click the Play button. The full-screen Play starts the show from the beginning.
Figure 1: When you click Play in the right panel, the slideshow plays without other panels visible.
To use your slideshow anywhere other than within Lightroom (including sending the show to others or playing it on the Web), you need to export it. Click Export at the bottom of the right panel. The Export Slideshow to PDF dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: The Export To PDF dialog box.
You need to make a number of choices in that box:
- Save in: Destination Folder. This is pretty standard computer stuff. Simply tell Lightroom where to put the finished slideshow file (choose a destination folder).
- File name. This is also standard computer workflow. Give your file a name.
- Quality. In Export, you have one file format choice: PDF. PDF slideshows are playable by most computers—they simply need Adobe Reader. Quality and Size settings affect how big the final file size will be, as well as the image quality of the photos in the slideshow. If you have a need to create as small a show as possible for transmission over the Web, for example, then you can use a lower Quality setting and a small size, such as 640 × 640. If you are going to show your images directly on a computer monitor or project them with a digital projector, I recommend keeping the Quality high (80 or above) and the size at 1200 × 1200 or more. You can also make the size specific to a display device resolution. Full Screen or not simply tells Adobe Reader how to display the image when opened. At this time, it is not possible to export music with images from Lightroom. You can only play music with a slideshow if it is played from Lightroom.
Where to go from here
For more information about Photoshop Lightroom, see the following:
- Photoshop Lightroom Design Center
- Photoshop Lightroom Getting Started Guide (PDF, 6.8M)
- Presentation possibilities in the Slideshow module, part 1: Preparing and selecting your photos, by Rob Sheppard
- Presentation possibilities in the Slideshow module, part 2: Customizing the slideshow’s appearance, by Rob Sheppard
