Creating a contact sheet is useful if you would like to be able to see a quick preview of a specific collection of photographs quickly. Before digital photograph you would have to prepare and print a contact sheet in the darkroom, however now it is much easier using Adobe Lightroom’s Print panel.
First of all, we want to select the photos that we would like to make a contact sheet with – in my example below I am using the entirety of my ’35mm work’ collection, you can however using the Ctrl key (CMD if on a Mac) and select each photo from the main collection that you would like to use.
You will see that all of my selected photos are white. Any photos that have not been selected will appear dark grey. Once you have decided on what photos you would like to make a contact sheet for, you need to navigate to the ‘Print’ tab, which is located at the top-right of Adobe Lightroom’s window.
You will see that mine is already displaying as a contact sheet – If yours is displaying as a single image, navigate to the left-hand side where you will see a ‘templates’ pane. Scrolling down this list, you will see an option for either a ‘4 x 5 Contact Sheet’ or a ‘5 x 8 Contact Sheet’ – This will automatically create your contact sheet with your chosen images.
On the right-hand side of the Print window, you will see a ‘Layout’ pane – from here you can control the borders and margins width and height of your contact sheet. You can also increase the amount of columns and rows and increase or decrease the cell size and spacing.
You can change various page options, which can be found on the ‘Page’ pane. Here you can control the background colour of the contact sheet, the font size and whether any information is displayed with each photograph – such as it’s filename.
Once you are happy with the layout and sizing of your contact sheet, you may proceed to print it. If you do not wish to physically print the contact sheet but you wish to save it as a PDF, you can do this by clicking the ‘Printer’ button, navigating to the PDF dropdown menu and selecting ‘Save as PDF’. You will then be prompted to choose a destination. Your contact sheet will then be ready to view.
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