Can you "Save For Web" in Lightroom?

August 6, 2009 3:53 PM

Best web photo prep software? Will Lightroom work?

Asking for a friend: She is using Adobe Lightroom on a Mac and is familiar with preparing photos for print. Now she needs to be able to prepare photos for a webblog (usually jpgs at medium compression and at no more than 500 pixels wide.)

I looked (quickly) at Lightroom and couldn't figure out how to first, resize an image and second, control the compression. Perhaps it's possible and I just couldn't find it?

If Lightroom is not the answer, I was hoping to find a standalone version of something like Photoshop's "Save For Web" feature where you can see how much compression you're adding and what the end result will be. She could export her photos from Lightroom, pull them into some standalone program to prep them for the web and save them from there. Bonus points for open-source.

Any ideas? Thanks.

posted by chocolatepeanutbuttercup to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

Lightroom is ideal for preparing photos for a blog. The settings you are looking for are under File --> Export. You can use the Export dialog to resize a batch of photos and you can control the JPEG compression settings. There is also a great feature for doing a final pass of sharpening; you can select "screen sharpening" to sharpen the images slightly in a amount that is appropriate for displaying on the web.

You can also create an Export preset in Lightroom to save a group of Export settings to reuse later.

There are also Lightroom plugins available to export directly to photo services like Flickr instead of saving to your computer. I don't know if there are any for exporting to a blog, but I would be surprised one wasn't available.

I used to use Photoshop for prepping photos for the web, but since I got LR I have only used it maybe once in about two years.
posted by kenliu at 4:04 PM on August 6, 2009

Forgot to mention that Lightroom has a "Web" feature for photo galleries, but this is for creating canned galleries instead of for posting individual images to a blog.
posted by kenliu at 4:07 PM on August 6, 2009

Lightroom is perfect for this. Adobe have some good Lightroom video tutorials here. Number 10 covers exporting amages.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 5:39 PM on August 6, 2009

Photo mechanic rocks for this. It's photo editing duct tape. And it' super simple and fast.
posted by thenormshow at 7:51 PM on August 6, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks everyone!
posted by chocolatepeanutbuttercup at 5:57 AM on August 7, 2009