Sharing Images

 Creating contact sheets

In either Photoshop or Bridge, you have tools that will help you to create and print multiple images per page. In this case, we'll start in Bridge and I want to select all of the images. So I'll use Cmd+A on the Mac or Ctrl+A on Windows to select all. Then under the Tools menu, I'll select Photoshop, and then select Contact Sheet Two. Contact Sheet Two is a script that will take you from Bridge over to Photoshop, and then display this dialogue box. Now it knows that you had images selected in Bridge and since you started in Bridge, it assumes that you want to use those files. Then down below, we get to set up our document so we can change our units if we want to.
I'll leave them to inches. And I'll create a document that's eight by 10 at 300 pixels per inch. I can also change the mode if I wanted to print this in grayscale for example. And I can change the bit depth. In this case, I'm going to leave it at eight bit but I will change the color profile to Adobe RGB. I don't want to restrict the number of colors to SRGB if I'm going to print this. I also have the option to flatten all layers. In which case when Photoshop creates the thumbnails, and the text layers, it would then flatten all of those at the end. If I want to keep them independent and a little bit more flexible, I can choose not to flatten the layers.
Then I need to decide how I want to display my thumbnails. I can place them across first or down first. I'll leave it set to across, but I don't need five by six columns and rows because I don't have that many images, so I'm going to change this to three columns and four rows. I can have Photoshop rotate them if I want to. I actually prefer not to, when you rotate them, some of the images might be larger. But then their kind of as-cue.
Some of them will be horizontal and some of them will be vertical. I'm also going to enable autospacing. And I want to use a file name as a caption. So underneath each thumbnail, Photoshop will add the file name. We can change the font if we want to. I'm just going to scroll down and choose Myriad, and I'm going to make this a lot smaller, maybe I'll change it down to Eight points. Now, if this is a setup that I use all the time, we can save this out and then I can load it the next time I want to use it.
For now, I'll simply click OK. When we click OK, Photoshop will open up a new document at the size that we asked it to, at the same resolution, and same bit depth, and same color space. And then it's going to open up each one of those images individually. And it will re-size it, and then it will bring it into this single document, and at the same time it's going to take the name of the layer, and it will add the name of the layer as a text layer. And it's going to leave those all as independent layers.
Now you can see what happened. Photoshop ran out of space on the first one because I told Photoshop that it could only put three by four images, and i had more images than that selected in Bridge, so Photoshop had to actually make two contact sheets. So it went ahead and did that. So we should just look at the Layers Panel for a moment. You can see that all of the Type Layers are independent, as are all of the Image Layers. Now I will just point out one thing. We started in Bridge, but you don't actually have to start in Bridge, you can start in Photoshop.
If I choose the File menu, and then select Automate, you can see that I have that same option for Contact Sheet. And if I select it, the only difference from running this script from either Bridge or Photoshop is the fact that I can choose my source images here. So it knows there's 15 files selected in Bridge, but I can go to a different folder and I could then browse and select that folder. I could include sub-folders, so if the folder has multiple folders underneath, it would include those.
And I can even choose to group those images by a folder. I could also select Files here and Browse and just open files, or we can choose to use the Open Documents if we want to. So that's the only differences. If you start in Bridge, you select the images you want and then build the contact sheet, whereas if you start in Photoshop, you also get to select your source. So I'll cancel out of there for now. And I think you can see that's a really easy way to create a contact sheet from either Bridge or Photoshop.