Jay Watson Photography

Here is a video tutorial on how to build diptychs in Adobe Lightroom. I was hit with a few emails asking about how this is done, and wanted to share some of my discoveries and workarounds. Man, I wish I had something like this years ago. Cumulatively I have wasted years doing this in Quark (cough!) and PhotoShop (time suck). Finally there is a super fast and intuitive way for photographers to put multiple images together on a page. Your money also gets you additional tips on custom sizing, exporting, and archiving your finished diptychs.

Tutorial: Diptychs in Adobe Lightroom from Jay Watson on Vimeo.

This is the first tutorial shared on this blog, and it feels incredibly geeky of me to post a software demo. Maybe I am paying back the world for all the free demos I have viewed online. Whatever the truth is behind this demo, PLEASE set me straight. If you dig it, share the link. If it is wack, let me know so I can put effort towards building log cabins other things.

click to enlarge

Adobe Lightroom Tutorial: screen capture of diptych settings. © Jay Watson Photography

This week marked the final deadline to submit images to PDN’s Faces. Above are the images I entered after finally getting around to building the master files from a series of self portraits I shot for my site last summer. They were submitted individually but seem to work well as a diptych. Recently I figured out a cool way to build custom diptychs in Adobe Lightroom. It is just a simple trick that involves creating a custom document size in LR’s Print module. This makes experimenting with image parings more intuitive, and eliminates the need to use PhotoShop for such a simple task. Should I demo this in a tutorial? Let me know and I’ll consider sharing the how-to in a future post.

Note: I made dozens of calls to lumber yards searching for a few sheets of wood paneling last summer. They just don’t supply this good stuff anymore. Eventually I scored at a salvage yard that resells material from tear downs and demolitions. Oh yeah, Devo likes carrots and bully sticks.