Joe Houghton shows how to export photos at a specific size in Lightroom using the Long Edge setting at 1920 px, which automatically preserves aspect ratio. He sets resolution to 200 dpi, limits the file to 2 MB, and saves the settings as a reusable preset called Long Edge 1920 for Club, resulting in a 1.3 MB file at 1920 × 1080.
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Hi, my name is Joe Houghton and this is Lightroom Bytes number 11, how to save an image and resize it at the same time. So this is quite a common issue for club photographers perhaps. So, so here's, here's some images that I took the other day and I just want to quickly take you through the process in Lightroom of saving an image And maybe, you know, at a particular size. So for a lot of competitions or for club submissions, for instance, 1920 pixels long edge is often used. So if we took, you know, a shot— so here's one that I've taken of, I think it's a Red Admiral butterfly, and, you know, reasonably happy with that. I've actually cropped this down slightly press the R key, go into the Crop tool, you can see that I've actually chosen the 16:9 crop here. Okay, so, so that is, is the crop. And then, so if we hit Enter, if we come back into Library module and G brings us back into the grid, we can see now down here in the metadata that the the cropped dimensions of this image are 3716 by 2090 pixels. So what we want is we want to send this into Klub. So we click on the Export button with the image that we want selected, and then the first thing we do is we choose where we're going to put that. So maybe we put this, you know, I've got a folder that I maintain called Print Photos where the photos that I output from Lightroom go. And then I'll create perhaps a club folder, subfolder, and if that doesn't exist, this will create it on the fly under Print Photos. Always make sure you check that Add to This Catalogue box as well, and then Lightroom will keep track of this new image that we're creating, this exported image. So I'm not going to cover file naming today. The file settings for an exported file, typically that would be JPEG, so I'd normally leave that up there. Some clubs will limit the file size. So if the file size has a limit, so sometimes say that there's a 2 megabyte limit, okay, well, 2 megabytes is 2048K, okay? So you, you can limit that file size there. But this is the, this is the area that we're really interested in today, is the image sizing. So resize to fit. Now You don't necessarily need to specify both width and height. If we click on this little dropdown, we can actually put the exact dimensions in, but what's easier is just to choose Long Edge. And what Lightroom will do is it will figure out what is the longest edge depending on, you know, whether it's a portrait or a landscape shot. So Long Edge, 1920 pixels. Resolution, Now 72 DPI used to be the old resolution for the cathode ray tube CRT screens, but we've come on a long way since then. If you're on one of these high-definition Retina displays, 4K, even 5K or 8K TVs now, you probably— I would normally go to 200 pixels an inch. It's going to make the file size a little bit bigger, but that will ensure that you've got lots of resolution on whatever screen this is going to be displayed on. And, you know, the rest of the stuff, metadata and stuff, I just normally leave most of that in. And at the bottom there, post-processing after export. I'm on a Mac, so I show in Finder. If you're on Windows machine, that'll say show in Explorer. So that's, that's the settings. And if you're going to do this more than once, what I would do there is I would add this. Once you've set those settings up, click on Add over here and call this Long Edge 1920 for Club. Give it a name that means something. And, and this is going to go under the User Presets. Folder here. So now if we go down, and these are all in alphabetical order, okay, there we are. So if we look, there it is, Long Edge 1920 for Club. So next time we come in, if we have a different image, all we have to do is just choose that, and then all the settings over here will be automatically applied to that image. So then we export the image, give it a second. You see in the top left-hand corner it's been exporting. So if I bring Finder onto the screen and I'll just drag it on there, you can see the image in Finder. The size is 1.3 megabytes, and the dimensions in Finder you can see are 1920 by 1080. So it's figured out the 1080 because it knew the ratio of the size, and we've told it that long edge was 1920, so we're good to go. So that's it, that's the end of the Lightroom Bites for today.
