Tutorial: Adobe Lightroom CC

There are many times where you are going to want to create a slideshow of just images. You have no video or audio, but your client wants you to produce something that is going to take all the images from a particular event and put them to a nice soundtrack with motion, some transitions, and some titles.
You can do this, of course, in your NLE, or in After Effects. There are a variety of ways to do this online through different websites. But you can also do it in Adobe Lightroom.

In this tutorial we’ll look at the newly updated slideshow feature in Adobe Lightroom 6--also known as Lightroom CC, depending on whether you buy it standalone or whether you download it as part of your Creative Cloud subscription service.

The slideshow capability has been in Lightroom for quite a few versions now, but they have updated it with a number of really nice, new features. Here we’ll look at what is available on the slideshow, and why you might use it for your video productions. We’ll also focus on some of the new features, particularly the ability to synchronize music very simply.

Our Project

Figure 1 (below) shows photos that I shot last fall of a benefit cycling ride.

Figure 1. Here are the photos we’ll use to build our slideshow. Click the image to see it at full size.

You can see from the first photo, shown in Figure 2 (below), that the ride started very early in the morning, before daylight. One of the guys actually ran the course instead of riding a bike.

Figure 2. First photo in the slideshow. Click the image to see it at full size.

You can see in Figure 1 that I’ve got about 40 photos. It ends with all the guys at the finish line with the big, giant fake check showing how much money they raised (Figure 3, below).

Figure 3. The final image in the slideshow. Click the image to see it at full size.

In between I have got all the images in chronological order, showing the day--everything from support teams, to breaks where the two different riding groups stopped for some carbs and water, and so on, all the way to where everybody's coming to the finish line and you see all the crowds. There we see kids and families with signs, excited for the cyclists to make this ride.

Filling the Frame

The first thing I want to do is I want to make sure I have the Zoom to Fill Frame checkbox selected (Figure 4, below). If I don’t, my vertical images are not going to take up much of the frame.

Figure 4. Select the Zoom to Fill Frame checkbox to make sure your vertical images fill the frame. Click the image to see it at full size.

I want to max it out to the point where the entire screen is filled with my image (Figure 5, below).

Figure 5. The same vertical image with Zoom to Fill Frame selected. Click the image to see it at full size.

The guides you see on the right side of the Lightroom UI in Figures 4 and 5 will help you to line up the images.