Occassionally you will want to go through all your photos, group them together and place them where you can find them for a special purpose (such as content for a coffee table book, portfolio, or fine-art exhibit). Furthermore, once I've done that, I often find that I want to "style" that collection so that it has a unified look that appeals to my target audience, the "pop" of the presentation I want to make, or the "look" that I want a collection of fine art to have so that it has its own special "character."

The first challenge is just collecting all the pictures. The second is finding the most efficient way to do all the work that it takes to style the whole collection. Here's a method I've found that lets me get the whole job done in just a few hours...not weeks.

First of all, Lightroom makes it very easy to pull a collection together, even when you need to look through all the photos in a Catalog. If you’ve already been very religious about entering keywords, then just use the Find panel. Choose Keywords from the Text pull-down, leave Contains All as the Rule, and enter the keyword for the images you want to find. Almost instantly, they're all right there in front of you.

Then there's reality: If you’re like me and are always in too much of a rush to religiously enter keywords or might not have throught of a word that would pull all the right images together: Go through All Photographs and add a keyword that is the name of your exhibit/project by entering the name of the exhibit in the Paint Keywords field. Use the Page Down key and click any image you think might belong in the collection.

Now you can go to the Find panel and type in the keyword you just Painted onto all those dozens of shots. Bam! That's all you see when you look at the Library module.

Just for fun, I wanted to pick very abstract images of just about anything because I felt they really lent themselves to experimentation. You can see a part of the collection I accumulated in the image below by clicking on it so that it expands to an enlarged version.

Next, I Select All the images, Right Click, and choose Make Virtual Copies. I repeated this three times. The next step is optional, but I wanted to do lots of experimentation, so I created a Collection of just the Virtual Copies by doing a Select All, then deselecting all the originals and dragging the virtual copies into a Collection called Abstract Exhibit (you can call yours anything you like, of course).

Once I’ve got all the virtual copies made, I create a new collection by going to the Collections panel, clicking the + sign, and entering the name of my exhibit (or presentation, portfolio, or whatever). In this case, I called it Abstract Exhibit. In Library’s Grid mode, I Select All, then deselect the originals. Then I place the cursor in the center of the Virtual Copies and drag them to the Abstract Exhibit collection (you’d be dragging yours to whatever you called your collection). Now I’ve got all these copies of all these images in one place and I can come back to it any time I like.

The next thing I do (whenever I get around to it) is open the collection and select the image I hope will be most typical of what I’ll want to do to all the images. What we’re doing here is setting up three individual “looks”, each of which will be a possible candidate for how the collection will be visually “flavored”. Remember, everything Lightroom does is non-destructive, so we can still alter the individual images any way we want, once we’ve settle on the overall “look” or style.

I collect Presets because it stimulates my imagination to experiment with them. I can do a lot more experimenting with presets than if I were to try each of the stages for the preset individually for each of the images. So now that I’ve selected the first of the Virtual Copies, I open all the Preset collections, and select the first of each of the Virtual Copies in the collection by pressing Cmnd/Ctrl and clicking. Then I watch the Preview window, and glide my cursor down the presets until I find a look I really like. This time, I want to try one of the collections in a Black and White interpretation, so I choose an Aged Photo look.

I want to apply this look to all of the images I’ve selected, so I press D to go to the Develop module and then click the Sync button. When the dialog appears, I leave everything checked so that anything the presets have been told to do gets done, and click OK. All the selected images get processed the same way by the chosen Preset.

I repeat the preset processing with a different preset style for each of the other two virtual copy collections, one-at-a-time. Now I have three (possibly very) different looking image styles. Below, you can see the original and three styles of two different images.

Now, when you look at the collections, you’ll discover that some of the images that have been “re-styled” are now way out of a reasonable exposure range. That can be fixed by making some individual adjustments on each of them in the Develop module. But first, I have enough shots that work well to determine which style I’m going to use. So I just delete all the other virtual copies. Then I go “fix” the ones that need fixing in the collection. Those that can’t be fixed are just deleted from the collection. So are those that just don’t work. What’s left over usually works amazingly well.

This is definitely creativity through experimentation, though. There are no guarantees. I’ve put together one collection I really liked and a couple I hated. But out of the ones I hated, I manage to find two or three images that are really exciting and that I might never have thought to process that way.

If you do put together a collection you really think will sell, find a mat, a frame, a collection name, and make a slide show or web gallery of the whole collection. Better yet, use Photoshop’s Vanishing Point to make a gallery collection. If you’re really ambitious, put the whole gallery collection into a Blurb or LuLu book and send the book to some prospective publishers.