Contact Sheets

Today, I am going to talk about contact sheets. This is very familiar to professional photographers so every aspiring ones should know about this. A contact sheet is a piece of paper where several photo thumbnails are printed. You might ask, what are the uses of contact sheets? Well, for starters, contact sheets are mainly used to review your images before you decide to print them full size.

Contact sheets were introduced long before the advent of digital cameras. Early photographers produce the sheets from film negatives and positives. The process was very time consuming – involving darkrooms and translucent light diffusers.  To give you an idea of how creating contact sheets were difficult, books were written about it! Ansel Adams’ The Print (1950) is solely dedicated to creating and enlarging contact sheets.

Luckily for our generation, we are gifted with digital cameras that don’t require traditional films, thereby eliminating the tiresome process in creating contact sheets.  Aside from digital cameras, we are also graced with softwares that dramatically changed how we do our business.

I am going to teach you how to create contact sheets using the popular software Adobe Photoshop. Don’t worry, you don’t need to set up a darkroom and it won’t take you more than 5 minutes either. Just click and play the video above and follow along.

If you have anything you need clarified, just comment below this post.

I hope you enjoyed this toturial.