Contact Sheets

[rogerm]

Help. Can someone please tell me how to create 'space concious' contact sheets from my D60 using Adobe Photoshop 7? A step by step for A4 would be useful.

[john_houghton]

By "space conscious", do you mean that you are unhappy about the amount of space wasted on the sheet because the thumbnails are too small? If so, I agree with you. I investigated alternative programs for doing this and found IrfanView (freeware) very good, though limited to one sheet at a time. Otherwise, ThumbsPlus was excellent, though not cheap, especially if that is all you want to use it for.

John

[rogerm]

Many thanks for your reply. You guessed correctly, there's far too much wasted paper. However, I work in a Mac environment and I doubt the program you've suggested would do the job. I know it's possible to create effective contact sheets with images from a Nikon digital camera using 'Actions' in Adobe Photoshop, I'm just hoping someone out there has carried out the same operation with the D60 and can give me a step by step guide.

[PJ Saine]

For less white space, try changing the # of thumbnails in each direction (5 across by 6 down) and using a small (8 pt.) font size. Try setting the Document size to 8x10 and the resolution at 600DPI.

Pat

[john_houghton]

pj saine wrote:
For less white space, try changing the # of thumbnails in each direction (5 across by 6 down) and using a small (8 pt.) font size. Try setting the Document size to 8x10 and the resolution at 600DPI.
This will give 30 thumbnails of about an inch in size per page. Irfanview can pack 72 images of much the same size per page.

It occurs to me that one solution would be to use Photoshop to generate an oversize page of thumbnails and then create an action to remove the unwanted blank space. This can be done by selecting each column in turn and moving it left to close up the gaps. Then do likewise for the rows. Finish off by cropping away the surplus space to the right and bottom. The action can then be applied to generated contact sheets either using a function key or using the batch option. If you standardise on your layout, you need only to create one action, so it should be practical.

John

[Kevin Connery]

Creating an action in Photoshop to remove blank spaces works like a charm.

My standard contact sheets are now 12-up (4-across/3 down) and 20-up (5 across/4 down). Both are based on vertical 2x3 images, and I tell Photoshop that the page size is 12x12 or 12.5x13 respectively, then run an action to take off file extensions (.tif, .psd, .jpg), squeeze the spaces out, crop to 8x10, and add a title/logo.

I've used iView (pretty good), GraphicConverter (OK), and a dozen other thumbnailers, but the Photoshop based one--although it's the slowest of them all--gives me what I wanted.

Creating the action took about 5 minutes--the hardest part was finding the right page size to tell Photoshop to use.