Today’s Question: In your September 1st “Printing Photos” Ultimate Live Learning session, you explained and demoed how to print to JPEG files. Is there a way to print to a PDF?
Tim’s Quick Answer: While there isn’t a built-in feature in Lightroom Classic that enables you to export a PDF document based on a print layout in the Print module, you can accomplish this task by using a PDF virtual printer.
More Detail: Lightroom Classic includes a feature in the Print module that enables you to save JPEG images reflecting the print layout you’ve defined. For example, you could generate JPEG images that reflect a contact sheet layout that spans multiple pages, and then share those JPEG images with a client via email rather than sending printed contact sheets.
While Lightroom Classic doesn’t include a built-in feature for generating a PDF document based on a print layout, you can still generate a PDF from the Print module using a PDF virtual printer via your operating system.
For Macintosh users there is an option to print to PDF built into the operating system. For Windows users you can add the Microsoft Print to PDF virtual printer, or the Adobe PDF virtual printer via Acrobat.
In the Print module in Lightroom Classic you would then set the “Print to” popup in the Print Job section of the right panel in the Print module to “Printer”. Then click the Printer button at the bottom of the right panel and use the feature to print to PDF, either by selecting the virtual printer in Windows or using the PDF popup at the bottom-left of the Print dialog on Macintosh.
When you print to PDF in this way, the exact same layout you’ve defined will be generated as a single PDF file, rather than potentially multiple printed pages if you printed to paper.
