The whole process, start to finish.

I thought it might be helpful to illustrate the complete process of creating an eBook from start to finish. The final eBook can be placed on your server of choice and made available to anyone you want. If it contains client-specific pictures, adding password control to the downloadable file is an easy enhancement, explained below. In this case the book created is not password protected.

The tools used are:

• Lightroom 2 or 3 for assembly of the pictures
• Lightroom 2 or 3’s Slideshow module to create a PDF file
• iWork Pages to make title, colophon, etc. additional pages
• Apple Preview to add these pages to the PDF

As I have saved templates in Pages for the Front and Colophon pages, all I need do is modify these and re-save them as PDFs before adding them to the PDF book exported from Lightroom. You should do likewise to smooth and speed the process.

Having done this a few times I thought it might be fun to time the complete process. It took me just fifteen minutes to select the 20 pictures for the eBook, move them to a new Collection in LR3, arrange them in my preferred order, save the PDF and then add front and colophon pages. I call that pretty efficient. This timing assumes you have the constituent pictures in Lightroom and that they have been processed to your liking before you start.

Here are the screenshots showing the process:

Select the pictures for a new Collection in Lightroom – I hold the Command (Apple) key in Lightroom->Library and mouse click the ones of choice:

In Lightroom, click Library->New Collection and check the box as shown:

Go into the Collection in Lightroom->Library and drag and drop the pictures in your preferred order:

Jump to the Lightroom->Slideshow module and uncheck the boxes for the Intro Screen and Ending Screen – you want to do this to ensure page numbering is correct:

Click on ‘ABC’ at the base of the screen and select the data you want to display on each picture – I have selected ‘Sequence’:

Place and size your data box:

Choose your background and frame color preference using the Slideshow panel on the right. Now, export the slideshow to a PDF by clicking on ‘Export PDF’ on the lower left. Use the Quality=50 setting shown. Extensive tests, documented here, show this to be optimal for a wide variety of display devices.

You are done with Lightroom. Open iWork Pages and create or modify the front page:

In this case I wanted an image on the cover so I popped back into LR3 and exported a JPG of my picture of choice, then drag and dropped that onto Pages. Eventually I also changed the type from red to blue to improve visibility. You have a lot of control in Pages:

Still in Pages, create the Colophon:

Note that I have added Hyperlinks to my sites at the lower right of the colophon page – easily done in Pages using Insert->Hyperlink->Webpage (or email). This is a powerful tool for marketing your services if you are a pro. Any reader of your book can simply click these to contact you.

Using Pages->File->Export, export both the front, colophon and any other pages to separate PDF files.

Now open the PDF of pictures you exported from Lightroom in Preview and drag and drop the cover page into position in the right hand Sidebar (View->Sidebar->Show Sidebar if you cannot see it):

Repeat the above step for the colophon and any additional pages. Now save the enhanced file from Preview – this is where you can add password protection if required:

You are done! To put the timing in perspective, creating the eBook and this whole article from scratch, including file upload to server and all the screenshots took me just 50 minutes. The hard work was in writing this blog piece (35 minutes) and the easy part was making the book (the other 15 minutes).

All that remains is to move the file to your display storage of choice – file server, iPad, whatever.

And to see the finished product, click the picture below. Need I add ‘Best viewed on an iPad”?

Enjoy!

Click picture to download PDF file.

Beautiful engineering.

Click the picture to download the book.

The dream is becoming a reality.

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Before the iPad even hit the shelves I was fantasizing in these pages about the value this tool would add for working photographers. It’s easy to generate PDF files of your work using the simplest tools (Lightroom, Pages and Preview is what I use) or, if you are a real publishing maven like UK photographer Roy Hammans, you can use sophisticated tools like Adobe’s InDesign to craft very professional looking eBooks. Take a look at Roy’s splendid collection of weathered boat hull abstractions which you can download from his site here. Do yourself a favor and move it to your iPad which displays them far better than a regular computer monitor, if my well calibrated Dell 2209WA is anything to go by. Also, I much prefer GoodReader on the iPad as a viewing app for PDFs to iBooks, which is clunky to load and slow to focus and sharpen each image.

I have asked the makers of GoodReader to provide enhanced slide-to-slide transitions (fades, dissolves) – let’s see if they come through. I would have asked the arrogant fruit company to do this for iBooks on the iPad but have you ever received a response from Apple on anything? After all, this is a company whose philosophy is increasingly “That’s how we like it. Take it or leave it, pal.”

I can generate a PDF of, say, 100 pictures from Lightroom (maybe Aperture has a like feature?) in a few minutes, add cover pages in a few more and have the whole thing on the iPad seconds later; imagine how this would work at any magazine with a lot of art directors, editors and photographic content. The photographer bangs away, the pictures are moved to Lightroom and thence to the iPad and the art director, minutes later each of the many team members is holding an iPad in his or her hands and making the decision what to cull and what to keep. Separately, a version is placed on the photographer’s server for downloading to the Big Cheese’s iPad in the sixtieth floor’s corner office. Eventually, the iPad app will have a Keep/Reject function for the editor to use, will be handed back to the photographer’s assistant, sync’d with Lightroom and, hey presto, off we go to press. Or rather, off we go to ePress.

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Anyone looking at the nineteenth century paste-up technology used by Anna Wintour in making the September Issue of Vogue would be blind not to see the possibilities.

Now that I have done this a couple of times, I checked my timing when doing a 24 page eBook of beach pictures. These were all in Lightroom 3 and I simply copied them to a Collection, added the color wash in LR’s Slideshow module, exported to a PDF, opened the PDF in Preview and then dropped in the front and Colophon pages which I made in iWork Pages. Start to finish took me thirty minutes. Had there been 100 pictures the additional time would have been a couple of minutes or so, the most time consuming step being the creation of the front and Colophon pages. I have saved these as template files for future use to make things easier. Click the picture to download the PDF:

Now available FREE.

Back in 2005 I published a book of one hundred black and white street snaps named Street Smarts, using Lulu.com. It sold well which gratified my ego and made my charities happy, as they got the proceeds. The pictures were taken during my last six years of life in London and my first six years of what became a 35 year love affair with my first Leica, an M3. They were taken in London and Paris during the period 1971-77, right until I left permanently for America.

You may contrast my street snapper style from 40 years ago with today’s by also downloading the identically priced Street Snaps 2009-2010 and, in addition to the exclusive use of color where monochrome once ruled, I hope you will also find more joy and humor in the later work, and a more spontaneous approach. Over a forty year period one changes ….

Click picture to download.

My new FREE book.

Online publishing being the thing of the future, I have created a new book in PDF format which you can download free by clicking the picture below.

All but the first were taken on the Panasonic G1 with its kit lens; the exception was made on the Canon 5D. All snaps were taken during the past year in San Francisco.

You can view these in a browser of your choice on your desktop or laptop or, better still, save (File->Save as…) the downloaded PDF file and drop it on iTunes to sync with your iPad or, even better, if you use GoodReader ($0.99) on your iPad get the free GoodReaderUSB utility, plug your iPad in and drag and drop the PDF onto your iPad where you can then view it in GoodReader. (To mitigate image theft I have disabled right-clicking on this site).

This PDF was created using the slideshow PDF export capability of Lightroom 2/3. The PDF file was then opened in Preview and the cover and colophon pages, created in iWork Pages and saved as single page PDFs, were dropped in. The whole thing was then saved again as a PDF and uploaded to my server. Lightroom 3 does allow you to add Intro and Ending pages but I didn’t notice that until it was too late!

The file is 14mB and should download fast – 45 seconds here. It is optimized for viewing on the iPad. You can also download the book by clicking on ‘my books’ in the right hand column, under the ‘links’ tab.

Enjoy!

Update July 21, 2010: Now expanded from 44 to 100 photographs.