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Earlier in the year we reported on the new Airtight galleries that had been designed as add-ons for the Lightroom Web module. Maybe you checked out this story, downloaded these galleries and installed them. If you didn’t well not to worry, because these are now included as part of the lightroom 1.3 update and provide you with an extra set of gallery formats to compliment the standard Lightroom gallery styles.

So now that you can access these in Lightroom 1.3, let me show you some examples of these in galleries in use and point out some of the gallery options. In the Web module you have a Gallery panel, which originally contained just the Lightroom HTML and Lightroom Flash gallery options. Now that third parties have started to construct their own gallery styles for Lightroom, it has been possible to install extra gallery styles. The Airtight gallery styles started out as such a project and as I say, have now been incorporated into Lightroom 1.3. Although other styles can be installed too. You will notice in Figure 1 a few extra galleries that I downloaded from TheTurningGate.net website. Whenever you switch to one of these new gallery styles you will see all the other Web module panel options change to reveal the custom options that are associated with each particular style. Let’s begin with the Auto Viewer Gallery.

Figure 1. The Airtight AutoViewer Gallery panel options.

The AutoViewer gallery will create a self-running slideshow web gallery, for which you can adjust things like the Frame size, padding and slide duration, background and frame color. Plus you can adjust the image size and JPEG quality in the Output Settings.

Figure 2. A web browser view of the Airtight AutoViewer Gallery style in action.

Unlike some of the other gallery styles, you won’t be able to fully appreciate how the gallery style works until you hit the preview in Browser button. Figure 2 shows a screen shot of how the finished gallery page should look and if you click on the screen image here you can see an example of this gallery style in action.

Next, we have the PostcardViewer gallery style.

Figure 3. The PostcardViewer panel options.

This gallery features a rather interesting use of Flash to create the postcard layout you see shown here in the sample web browser page below. As you can see in Figure 3, there are a few more panel options here so you can set the number of columns to use plus the zoom factors for the small thumbnails and larger view images.

Figure 4. here are two views of a PostcardViewer gallery style.

The two screen shots in Figure 4 show a web browser view of the gallery in use (click on the images to see a sample gallery page). Once viewed via a browser you can try out the navigation shortcuts: use the Spacebar to toggle between the thumbnail and large image view and use the keyboard arrow keys to navigate from one postcard image to the next.

Following that, the SimpleViewer gallery style.

Figure 5. The SimpleViewer gallery panel options.

The SimpleViewer gallery is fairly similar to the standard Lightroom Flash gallery ‘paginated’ layout, such as that used for the Blue Sky template, but it also offers a few nice flourishes such as the ability to precisely control the thumbnails layout and customize the frame size and padding.

Figure 6. Here is a browser view screen shot of the SimpleViewer gallery in use. Click on the image to see a SimpleViewer gallery in action.

You may have noticed the ‘TTG’ gallery styles that are included in my Lightroom interface screen shots. These are some of the TheTurningGate.net galleries that I referred to earlier. To end with, here is a Lightroom Web module preview of a TurningGate Polaroid™ gallery style:

Figure 6. The TurningGate.net Polaroid Type I 1.2 gallery style.

With this web gallery the photos are cropped to a square format and placed in a Polaroid™ style print border and the photos presented on the page can be dragged about however you like and you click on an individual picture to see a larger view.

Pretty cool huh? I won’t go into all the details of how to install these galleries. Maybe I’ll cover that in a later tutorial. For now I do recommend that you visit the website to check out this and other Gallery folder downloads.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17, 2007 at 6:19 am and is filed under Adobe Lightroom News, Digital Multimedia, Lightroom Tutorials, Lightroom Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.