Creating a Before/After Slideshow In Lightroom

For the recent “Real World Lightroom” workshop, I wanted to show students the creative power of Lightroom 3 as both a RAW processor and a way to make great slideshows for presenting their work. Here’s a short video made using the slideshow module of Lightroom showing before and after versions of some of my recent photographs.

Here’s How I Made It

– For the images, I selected several that would serve as the after slide. Then I created virtual copies of each one and cleared out the adjustments so that they looked like they were just imported. These were manually sorted in the slideshow module so that the before images were in order. Also, I had to make sure the cropping and alignment was the same so that the image wouldn’t seem to shift too much during the fade transition.

– For the intro and outro slides, I created the graphics in Photoshop at 1920 x 1080 resolution, the final output size of my slideshow when exported . Once I exported the slideshow from Lightroom at 1080p, I imported the video file into Premiere Pro CS5 and added the intro and outro slides and music. I could have created the video entirely in Lightroom, but would have lost the ability to have the intro and outro slides show full screen.

– For the background, I modified a cool wallpaper from Bartmelme Design which are available for free – (thanks guys!), and placed it as my background image in Lightroom – a very cool feature.

Finally, I uploaded the video to Vimeo, but you can use any number of other video sharing sites

Hope that inspires you to create your own slideshows in Lightroom and get creative with presenting your work in a way that helps you stand out from the crowd! Any questions or suggestions, please let me know!