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E-Mailable Proof Sheets
The one thing that the Print Module doesn't do that I wish it did is make it easy to send proofs to clients...especially those who don't know much about computers. You see, being out of the country has a cruel way of teaching you the need for such things. Just before I left, I had a portrait shoot with a terrific jazz singer, Dianne Zellers, who's musical career is rapidly rising. But in the hassle of getting everything ready to go, there just wasn't time to process the photos;and by the way, Dianne knew that before we did the shoot. However, I thought it would be no problem to process the photos in Costa Rica in Lightroom, then just send her a slide show. I did that, but she didn't know how to open a PDF file. She has a boyfriend who knows all about such things, but it just happened that he was pretty ill at the time. There was no easy place to put a private web gallery, either. So I thought: How about making a proof sheet in the Print module, then emailing her the proofs?
Ah. Now that looked really nice. You can see the result below.
Unfortunately, I'm not in a living situation where I can set up a printer. So the first thing I did was maximize the size of the workspace panel so it could take up as much screen space as possible. Then I used Snagit 8 to capture each of the screens for each proofsheet page. If you don't have Snagit or another third party screen capture program that can do the same thing, you can just use your OS to capture the entire screen and then trim down to just the proof sheet in Photoshop (or any other image editor that will read a JPEG).
But then, since I do have SnagIt, I found there was an easier way to do it. Previously unbeknownst to me, Snagit also installs itself as a printer. So if you use the printer menu to choose SnagIt as the printer, then all you have to do is set SnagIt to save as JPEG, then choose SnagIt and the Printer in Lightroom's Printer Settings. What results is that SnagIt opens with a full-page, full-resolution proof sheet. I use the Image > Scale > Resize command to reduce the size to 600 pixels wide. Then I have an image small enough to attach several proof sheets to a single email. Or, if you have availability for uploading the images to a client accessible URL, you could keep them at full size.
Another solution is to print to PDF. On Mac OSX this is built in, while for Windows you can get the open source pdfPrinter.
I think the problem was that the client didn't know how to open pdf files, that's why Ken resorted to screen copy type of a thing.
Maybe even better would be rather straight export to e-mail with HTML coding to make it look like a proof sheet. Should be quick and easy to do.
Regards
Marek