In this tutorial Joe Houghton walks photographers through two practical methods for assembling a multi‑image panel in Adobe Lightroom, a common requirement for club shows and competitions. He first shows how to locate relevant photos using the Library Filter, add them to a new Collection (the “panel”), and then arrange and trim the selection in Survey View with Lights‑Out mode, including how to flip or transform images and capture a hanging‑plan screenshot. He then demonstrates how to export the final four images as JPEGs that meet specific size constraints (max 1600 × 1200 pixels) with custom naming. Finally, he covers the Print module’s Custom Package layout for more precise control over the panel’s visual arrangement, detailing how to add borders, inner strokes, and take a final screenshot of the layout to include with the competition submission. Throughout, he emphasizes practical shortcuts, keyboard commands, and file‑management steps to streamline the workflow.
Chapters
Hi there, this is Joe Houghton, and in this short video I want to walk you through a couple of ways of creating a panel. This is something we're quite often asked to do, maybe as club photographers or for competitions, and Lightroom will give us some ways of making this process a little bit easier. So I'm going to show you one using what we call the Survey View and a second one using the Print module of Lightroom to organize the hanging pattern of your panel so that the organizers can see how you want your panel to be presented. So let's start off, and the first thing you've got to do is you've got to choose some images. So I'm going to imagine that we've got a competition where we have 4 images that have to be submitted with a certain screen size that we have been told about. So the first thing we need to do is we need to choose our images. So I've got a folder here called Print Photos with 9,500 images. So what I want to do is I'm going to submit a panel of light trails images. So I need to find all my light trails images. So I need to go up to the Library Filter, and if you can't see the Library Filter in the grid view of the Library module, just press the backslash key and that will show the library filter. And I want to go up to text and I'm going to do a search across all my 9,500 images for light trails. So you can just type in there whatever text you want to put in, light trails. And as you can see now, the images in the grid below are limited to images that have light trails contained in the text somewhere. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is I need to make a choice of some of these light trails images. So I'm just going to pick them and hold the Command key as I'm, as I'm picking them, um, and, you know, pick a few of the images that, that I might consider to use, um, for my, for my light trails images. Okay, so there we go. And see whether there's any other possibilities. Maybe that one. And if I get a few duplicates, it doesn't actually matter because later on we can sort that out. So, you know, let's, let's just pick a couple of those, those images. Okay, now those are all highlighted, so they're all selected at the moment. So the next thing I need to do is I need to go down to Collections in Lightroom, click on the plus, and create a collection. And I'm going to call this Light Trails Panel. Let's try spelling that correctly. There we are. Include selected photos, so all the selected photos that I've just chosen will be put into this panel. And a panel is just like a virtual folder. You don't need to check any of the other options unless you want to go back and add stuff to the panel later. So there we are. Okay, so I've got these images in my panel. Now the panel requirement for this competition is 4 images. So one of the benefits of putting images into a collection like this is that you can now bring them up in what's called Survey View. So Survey View is this button here, or you can get into it by just pressing the N key. Okay, so if I click in here, and I need to highlight all the images first, so Command+A or Control+A on a Windows machine, and that will highlight all the images. And now N for survey mode, and that gets me into this view. Now I want to just close down all the, all the tabs, so you know, you can do that individually like this, or you can do Shift and Tab to close things down as well. Okay, and I'm generally going to close my bottom toolbar, T, and then I'm going to put myself into what's called lights out mode, which is the mode in Lightroom where if you press L twice 1, 2, everything else disappears and you can just see the pictures. The nice thing about being in a collection is that you can now move the images around, so you can drag them and put them where you like. So what we really need to do first is we need to decide, well, which of these images are going to work for our collection, for our panel, and we can only choose 4. So I think the black and whites are not going to work this time, so hover over an image that you want to get rid of and just press the cross, and all that'll do is just remove it from this current view. It doesn't delete it, it doesn't even take it out of the collection, but it restricts the view of the images to the ones that are currently selected. So you're really just deselecting these images. Okay, well, let's say that this panel that I've got, I'm going to make it all my Irish light trail scenes. So maybe I get rid of Big Ben. There we are. And so now I've got to start looking at, you know, which ones I keep and which ones I don't and stuff. So I don't know, that one perhaps is, you know, don't want that one. And again, when you're thinking about panels, try and think of, you know, you probably need the images to be of a similar ratio and size. So maybe if I keep this one and this one, that's fine, but then I'm only going to have 2 more. Or maybe I get rid of these big ones because I just want the proper, the big panoramic kind of look ones, something like that. So maybe, you know, these look fairly similar. So I've got this one's very long, isn't it? So let's maybe lose him. And that now gives me, you know, 2 and 2 which are of similar perhaps proportions, pretty similar proportions, something like that. Okay, so then you've got to start working, well, where, you know, working out which ones will work best where. So maybe that works, but maybe, you know, I'd actually like this one because this one's coming in that way. I'd like this one down here, but with the light trails coming in the other way. So I could right-click on this and transform and flip that horizontally, for instance. Okay, so now my light trail is coming in that way. Now, you know, that looks a little odd now that I've done that, because actually the Customs House doesn't face that way with, you know, that particular bridge where it is. But in terms of putting them in for a competition, you might be fine with that. Okay, so just showing you how to do the transform. So that's one way of picking out and organizing your images. And then if you just wanted to save the screenshot as a hanging plan, you just hit Print Screen on a Windows machine, or I use Command+Shift+5 on a Mac, and then I just choose the area around those images like that, and I capture, and then if I come out of Lights Out and Show in Finder, then that is going to bring that image up in my Screenshots in Finder. So here's Screenshots in Finder, okay, and then I can rename that and call that Light Trails Panel Hanging Plan, and then maybe, you know, 1234 is my member number, because they don't normally want your name around this stuff, do they? Now, we'll just leave that in screenshots for a minute. So now I want to come back into grid view. So now what we need to do is get these photos saved into JPEG form that we can send out to the competition. So we've got our 4 images selected, so we can now go to Export or right-click on one of the images and choose Export from the dropdowns here. Okay, so there we are, Export, and just go up to Export there. And now we get into the export dialog, and I've covered resizing and doing all that kind of stuff and setting your names in earlier Lightroom Bites. So I'm going to export these to my Light Trails panel. There we are, just Get that right. So that's going to go into Print Photos, Light Trails panel. It's going to do some custom settings that I've set up here, picking up the sequence number and the title of the image and stuff like that. File settings, JPEG, resize to fit, so width maximum width 1600, maximum height 1200, so limiting to either whichever of those gets kind of hit first. And then at the end, I want to show in Finder. So that's going to export the images and then bring them up in Finder so that I can see that they're there. So if I hit Export, there we are, it's created that folder under Print Photos called Light Trails Panel Competition. And we can see that I've got my 4 images with, with the sequencing 1, 2, 3, 4. So, you know, if those are wrong, go in and change them again or whatever. And if we open this up, you can see that they're all 1600 pixels wide. They're slightly different heights, perhaps because of the different ratios of the images, but they're all 1600 wide, which was the competition requirement. And then if I want to include that hanging plan that I had, I can just come to the screenshots folder. I can just drag that one up into the same folder. There we are. So that's okay if we want to use the survey mode to figure out our hanging plan, but sometimes survey mode doesn't make it very easy if you've got, say, more than 4 images and they're not, you know, sitting in 3 at the top and 2 at the bottom or whatever as you want them to. So if you want to have a lot more control over how you organize the hanging plan, you want to be in the Print View. So let's go into the Print View. Make sure that you've got the Light Trails Panel Competition collection highlighted. So there we are, there's our Light Trails that we chose. Okay, and now we go over to Print. And you probably, as you come into Print, most of the time you'll have the template browser open, something, and it'll look something like this. You can ignore this left-hand side for now. So you're not going to use a template browser, and, and by default it'll be up probably here like this. So what I want you to do is I want you to go down to Custom Package. Now here's one that I'd done earlier on. So what will normally come up is a blank screen like this, and if there are boxes on it, you can just click on each one and delete them. And then you want to open up the bottom panel. And the bottom panel will show the images in your collection. So now you can just pick each of the images and you can drag them up from the panel at the bottom. And if the panel doesn't stay open, F6 is the bring that panel open, um, Function F6 on a Mac. So now I can just click on each one of these and I can drag them in to the panel, and then you can resize them. Now if you want to resize them all to the same size, what I normally do is resize one to the right size and then just put the next one up to it and just keep going until it matches the width. And again with this one, you can just hang it over this, pop it over, and then just match the width up. There we are. So That will get them all to be the same size, and now I can just move them around and put them where I want them. Okay, so maybe we want the 2 whooshy ones bottom left and top right, and then the other 2 are going to be, you know, square the other way, for instance. So you can decide how you want the look of this panel to be. Okay. If you want grids around them, you see the photo border there. If I turn it on, we can change the photo border and the width of the photo border as well. So we could kind of have them look like, you know, printed images sitting on the page there, or we can just turn those photo borders off and then there's no borders. You can also set an inner stroke. So if you want to say a gray inner stroke, You can do that stuff like that, and again, you know, play with the photo borders and stuff. So you can make these look as fancy as you like. But if if it's just a hanging plan, probably that's going to be enough. And then what I would normally do is now do a screenshot of that. So again, on a Mac, Command Shift Five, and then pull down the. The little area to take the screenshot. Capture it, right-click, Show in Finder. And then in Finder, that's going to bring that up again in Finder here, my Screenshots folder. There we are. And I can just come in here, and there's that screenshot. You can see So I can just name that Member 1234 Hanging Plan for Light Trails Panel, whatever. Okay, so then I can, I can have that in the screenshots folder, and then if I, if I'm in Windows Explorer or Finder or whatever, I bring up my Light Trails Panel competition folder as well. I can just bring this and, and drag it down into there. And now I can email those off or upload them to, to Club or whatever, and they're my, they're my images. So I hope that helps you with Lightroom and creating a panel, and I'll see you next time.
