Presets – Lightroom iPad Export Settings
I was loading some photos on my iPad this past weekend, and it led me down the path of figuring out what the best Lightroom photo export settings are for it. After working with various settings for a while (and after taking the kids to see the Karate Kid movie) I realized a few things.
1) I got better results from saving images to exactly the size of the iPad’s screen rather than letting iPhoto or the iPad resize them. For example, I had sent an email to myself with the photo you see below. It was a hi-res version of the photo and when I saved it to the iPad it looked really bad on screen.
2) The new Karate Kid movie is nearly the same as the original one (still pretty good though and the kids liked it) 🙂
3) The iPad won’t automatically zoom an image to fit the screen. It’ll put a black box around the edges if the photo’s aspect ratio isn’t the same as the iPad’s screen size.
So I created two presets. One that preserves the photo’s original aspect ratio (iPad will automatically add a black box around edges) and one that fits the photo to the full iPad screen (by automatically doing a center-based crop in Lightroom when it exports).
Here’s an example of the difference between the two (click to see it larger):
These are a little different to install than your usual Develop presets:
1) Unzip the preset zip file on to your desktop
2) Go to the File > Export menu to open the Export dialog (NOTE: THESE ARE NOT DEVELOP PRESETS SO DON’T INSTALL THEM THERE!)
3) Go to the Presets panel on the left. Right click on the words User Presets and choose “Import“.
4) Select the .lrtemplate files you unzipped in Step 1 and click Import (NOTE: DO NOT IMPORT THE ZIP FILE)