What a contact sheet is for
A contact sheet puts many images side by side on one page — the digital descendant of laying negatives on photographic paper. It is the quickest way to show a client a shoot, review a set of variations together, or attach a whole batch to an e-mail as a single file.
Getting a usable sheet
- Three or four columns keeps individual frames large enough to judge. Eight columns is an index, not a review sheet.
- Add files in a deliberate order — the grid fills left to right, top to bottom.
- Very large sheets consume a lot of memory. Split a shoot of hundreds of frames into several sheets.