The Slideshow module in Lightroom is one I’ve pretty much ignored until now, only using Library and Develop to sort and export (my, I’m in a rhyming mood today) all of my photos.

However, I do a lot of work with Future Foundations, and we like to take a lot of photos during a delivery – partly for marketing purposes, so we can show off the work we do, and also to close a programme with a great photo slideshow, giving the participants a reminder of what they’ve been through. Ordinarily I would have been shooting in jpeg to do this, as it is obviously quicker to download photos and have a slideshow ready for the end of a one-day programme, but I much prefer shooting in raw. Jpeg only really helped when I was using iPhoto for organisation and exporting photos into a .mov slideshow to play.

It turns out Lightroom’s slideshow mode doesn’t care if it’s dealing with RAW or jpeg (or dng, for that matter), and allows you to overlay your identity plate in whatever position you like. Of course, the identity plate allows for a small image to be used in place of text – perfect for a corporate logo.

So, I shot in RAW, as is my preference. I changed the identity plate from my own to the logo, and flagged the 45 or so best photos as I went along. (I would be shooting a little, then while sessions were being delivered, download and evaluate a small batch at a time.) Setting the filter to flagged photos only, I switched to the Slideshow module and hit enter. Sorted.

The module does have its shortcomings. You can’t then export the slideshow in movie format to share with others, and the graphical identity plate can’t be used as a watermark (unless you use the Lightroom 2 Mogrify plugin, which I happen to…). Export is only to PDF and JPEG, which for a slideshow is slightly confusing. There is the option to add text over (or under) photos, but I’ve not yet had a use for this, and as far as I can tell, it will be the same text on each photo.

All in all, it’s a pretty good feature. The killer for me is being able to shoot RAW even while working with only a couple of hours to shoot, download and put together a presentation, enabling me to go back later and export good quality jpegs with the editing they deserve.