I am so behind on blogging!! It has been a crazy week and I know the birthday party recap is going to take a bit of time to write.. in the meantime, here is my annual “Jasper’s Year in pictures” video.

And the ONLY reason that I had time to get this done is that Lightroom 3 makes it  SO easy to create slideshows like this! This was created completely within lightroom, no need to export any images anywhere.

I’ll just tell you how I made it easy on myself..

I created a “smart collection” that contained ONLY the images I’d edited since Jasper’s last birthday. Sure, I would still have to go through and pick out the ones that are of Jasper vs. clients or other things (keywording also really helps here!), but this gets me a LOT closer and gives me a much more reasonable number of images to sift through.

The reason I can distinguish between edited and non edited is that I edit ALL my files in Lightroom and then in Photoshop, so my edited files all are PSD files vs the unfinished RAW files.   Lightroom makes it very easy for you to pull ONLY the images that are PSD files into a smart collection and you can put a custom date range in there too!

Here’s how you make a smart collection like mine:

1) Click on the + sign next to collections and choose “smart collection” from the options.

2) Set up your filters, in my case I chose “file type” PSD

3) Click on the + sign to add more filters. I added a “captured after” date and set it to his birthday in 2010 and then another “captured before” date and set it to his birthday this year.

Here’s what my smart collection filter screen looked like:

Then I went to my new smart collection and added the images of Jasper I wanted to use to a quick collection by hitting the “B” key  and then selected all and created a new collection called “Jasper’s Third year”.

To create the slideshow:

Once I had the images, I switched over to the slideshow module where I added a soundtrack (music from triplescoop.com) and the titles. I set the transition speed to .5 seconds and selected “fit to music” so it autocalculated the slide duration so everything would be time correctly and that’s it!  Choose export to video from the slideshow menu and choose your resolution.

Hope that helps someone – it’s so simple to do in LR that even the busiest mom/photographer can find the time to create at least ONE slideshow a year right? :)

Filed under: birthdays, lightroom by ariana
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