I loved Mikkel Aaland’s piece on how to create a QuickTime movie with the Slideshow module. First, I’d been looking for a way to do that because I’d like to narrate and add music to some slideshows that talk about…well, more about that later. Mikkel’s blog also inspired me to do a piece on printing portfolios in the Print module.

Here’s the best part: You can print all your verticals in a project at one click of the Print button. Just select the verticals in the Filmstrip or in the Library module and then go to the Print module. Then you can do the same for all your horizontals.

The Print module is wonderful about doing lots of things, such as contact sheets and “job” sheets (multiple images on the same page). You can specify as many rows and columns as you like, so you can make big contact sheets or just select certain images in the Filmstrip and have them all appear on the same page. But that’s a topic for another blog…and it might even not be mine.

The part I’m really in love with is how much flexibility and control you’re given over printing a series of prints, all in a particular layout or style. That makes it possible to have the image be any size. You can tell Lightroom to automatically maximize the image, which brings it out to the borders in one dimension. You can put the image on the page in any direction…so you can have vertical images on portrait paper or horizontal images on landscape paper. Better yet, you can control the width of each of the borders simply by moving sliders and watching the borders change. So you can, for instance, push the image all the way to the bottom of the page so that you can fold the top back to make a greeting card. Or you can have even borders on the top and two sides and a wide border at the bottom in the old-time tradition of gallery prints.

There is also lots of capability for adding text to the print. For portfolios, you can use the Identity Plate and scale it to any size you like and change its opacity, so you can use it to identify yourself. You can add a line of text just below the photo that can contain editable custom text, date, equipment, exposure, filename, or sequence number-or any combination of these. It’s a little hidden, but you can even use the title or caption from IPTC Metadata, so each individual image can have its own title! You just have to remember to enter a title in the Library module before you go to the Print module.

Finally, you can specify the amount of print sharpening (I haven’t yet tested to see how this compares with the PhotoKit Output Sharpener or with Nik Sharpener, but some output sharpening is bound to be better than none).

Of course, Lightroom’s Print module uses the printer you’ve already installed and chosen in your operating system. So when you click Print Settings or Print, you see your printer’s own dialogs appearing and you can do whatever you’re used to doing when you print.