Quick Tip: Creating A Contact Sheet With Photoshop CS5
Photoshop used to have a cool feature where you could created contact sheets (or index cards) from a set of files on your computer. I use this feature a lot to create a giveaway card when shooting portraits for large groups of people (or Doras).
You needed to run a script called contact sheet from the automate menu, select some settings and TADA! Photoshop would magically create a contact sheet for you.
If you used this feature on previous versions of Photoshop, you may have discovered that it is missing from Photoshop CS5.
When searching the web, I learned that you can re-install this script using Adobe's "Optional Plugins" page.
There are actually two download pages, one for windows and one for mac. Once downloaded you get that time saving script back, along with some other useful scripts that were removed from CS5.
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Or, I believe, you can use
Or, I believe, you can use Bridge to do this. This is where Adobe shifted this to.
optional scripts may cause crashes
I just had my IT fellows install the scripts on our lab computers because I have used this feature for a long time for digital contact sheet submissions of digital photo class assignments.
However, they reported to me known problems with the old scripts, which run in 32-bit mode, while the main CS5/5.5 application runs natively in 64-bit mode. At least on Macs, this can cause freezes or crashes.
FYI
re: crashes
Thanks for the heads up Dave.
I am using 64bit photoshop, but on windows. (cry, cry) and have had no issues so far. I wonder if Adobe has a bigger set of scripts to cover the entire 32/64/mac/win combo.
Output Mode
In CS5 using the output workspace on bridge gives you a quick no-extra-installation-needed solution.
You can create contact sheets straight to PDF. And as an added bonus you can also create flash based galleries to impress clients quickly and easily.
I actually think output workspace gives you more power over the contact sheets you create than the old plugin did. At least that's my impression :) Highly recommended.
As Russ said
This (and more) is available in the Output Workspace in Bridge, this was changed to keep it compatable with Lightroom, but it's all still there.
Chris
PLug-In
i've downloaded this plug in but the contact sheet II button still hasnt appeared and i've opened photoshop in 32bit and 64bit. help! i dont want to save the contact sheet i just want to print it, I dont understand output i just want to click a button and there to be a contact sheet...
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