PDF Layout and Rendering

There are many ways to customize the look of your contact sheet, including page size, grid, and styling.

Rendering the PDF can take some time depending on the number of images, image size, and storage speed. To render the contact sheet after making layout changes use Cmd+R or click the "Render" button.

Page Layout

Here the page size and margin can be customized. The number of rows and columns can also be specified.

The display units can be set from the Layout menu.

Metadata

In addition to the visual layout options available PDF metadata can also be set, which will be visible in PDF viewer applications. The title, author, and subject fields can be set from the PDF Metadata section.

Default Metadata

In cases where it the same metadata is used often default metadata may be set in First Contact's preferences. This metadata will be used for new contact sheets. It should be noted that if the default layout includes metadata that will take precedence over the default metadata.

Header & Footer

Contact sheets can display rich headers and footers, divided into leading, middle, and trailing sections. The header and footer can be styled separately as needed and display any number of tokens, constrained only by space on the page. To show or hide a running block use the toggle switch to the right of the header.

In each section are three fields for each position in the running block. Text entered into the fields will be rendered in the contact sheet preview immediately. Pressing the … button will open a sheet with the full section setting, a preview of the text, and a list of available tokens.

To add tokens to the section simply drag and drop them into place. Tokens may also be copied from one text field to another.

Image Labels

Each image in the contact sheet can, optionally, show its filename. The font family, size, and color may be set from the Images Labels section. Depending on your needs the file extension can be shown as well.

Compressor

When First Contact generates a PDF the images are rendered to JPGs to increase compatibility and reduce overall file size, which can be especially useful when building contact sheets from large TIFFs or even RAW files. There is a direct tradeoff between image quality and PDF file size.

To create a smaller contact sheet the compression quality may be reduced. Like other image editors that export JPGs, 80-85% is generally a good balance of quality and size. By default the full size image is embedded in the PDF. This allows for a viewer to zoom into the image and see it larger and in higher fidelity (compression quality permitting) on screen. This does, of course, produce PDFs that are similar in size to the total size of the input images.

To create the smallest possible PDFs, which may be useful for emailing or other bandwidth constrained deliveries, Resample Images may be enabled. Doing so will reduce the dimensions of the rendered images to fit the cell size on the contact sheet. The size reduction can be dramatic. For example a ~16 MB PDF can be reduced down to 165 KB, the estimated size is always shown at the bottom of the window.