© Ake Vandervelden

Update: if you like this tutorial, then also check out this one, in which I take the template a notch up

When I saw the beautiful pictures and the beautiful print template that my talented fellow-photographer Ake Vandervelden had made, I asked her if she’d done it in Lightroom. She replied to me she had made it in Photoshop (with a lot of hard work) and that she had no idea if this could be pulled off in Lightroom.

Well, actually, it can… It’s just one of those occasions where you have to think Lightrooms different modules through. And with some creativity, and some ‘out of the box’, or should I say ‘out of the modules’-thinking, you can make this work and then save it as a Print Template, and never have to worry about doing this in Photoshop again… We will be adding the text with the… Slideshow module, of all things!

There’s a lot of advantages to keeping it in Lightroom:

• you don’t have to own (or open) Photoshop
• you don’t have to create a new (big) Photoshop file
• you can change your mind about which pictures to add, and where to put them
• you can easily make minor tweaks to the print template, and update the template with your new tweaks or save the tweaked version as a different template. Want one without white space between the pictures? Just make a new template…

Here’s a video explaining how you create this effect yourself. No Photoshop or Indesign was used during this movie .

Look ma, only Lightroom from MoreThanWords on Vimeo.

It’s actually the very first video tutorial I made (writing this down would have been far too long), so bear with me if not everything is perfect. I hope to be posting more ‘how-to’ videos because there’s a ton of stuff you can do in Lightroom.

For those of you who have bought my (Dutch) book on Lightroom: this technique is similar to the one discussed on page 192, but it goes even further!

In this video, I did everything in Lightroom, just to show you that it’s possible. However, there are some issues with adding text through the Slideshow Module: the biggest one is that it works okay for smaller sized prints. If you would want to make something poster-sized, you run the risk of running into the limitations of the Slideshow JPG Export feature. In an upcoming blogpost, I will show you that, with a little use of Photoshop (for those who have it), it’s possible to speed up the workflow even more and circumvene the resolution limit of the Slideshow Module text, while maintaining Lightrooms flexibility.

P.S. In my video, you will see the ‘Iran’ text centered in the frame. If you want to have it slightly above the center (like ‘Juliaan’ on Akes template), you can make use of the crop tool to make a square crop of the text and in the mean time reposition the text where you like.
P.P.S. Just a quick note to all you overseas visitors. I am planning on posting more English videos like this. So keep checking every once in a while!