Transcripts
1. Frame your photos on Export in Lightroom: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class frame photos on export in Adobe Lightroom. Today we're creating a frame effect that you can use when printing images from Lightroom. You'll learn how to add your branding to your images and how to configure them for printing to a printer or to disk. You'll also learn how to save your design so that you can use it at any time. As you're working through these videos, you'll see a prompt to recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who, just like you, want to learn more about Lightroom. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to everyone's comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started making a printable photo frame for your images using Lightroom.
2. Frame an Image - Part 1: With any print job that you plan to do in Lightroom, you'll probably want to start in the library module. This will allow you to select the images, and I suggest that you start with putting them in a collection. I have a collection here of six gaming machine images. They're all cropped to square because I want to print these out as square images with a border around them. Isolating the images into a collection is a are really good place to start. With one of these images selected, I'm going to the print module. When you get to the print module, you'll want to start in the print job area and select the kind of job that you want. You can print to a printer or you can print to a JPEG file. If you choose to print to a printer, you will need to set up your printer. On a Mac, here you'll have a couple of buttons to select, on the PC, it's just one. The principle is the same. You will need to select the print it to use and then you'll need to configure the size of paper that you want to print on, and via your properties you'll probably also want to specify things like the type of paper so that you set up your printer correctly for the kind of paper and the ink that you're using. Now, I don't have a photo printer attached to this computer so I'm going to click "Cancel." I'm going over here and I'm going to print to a JPEG file. This will allow me to either send my prints to a lab for printing or some other online service, or I could put them on the web if that's what I wanted to do. I'm going to print to a JPEG file. For a JPEG file, just as you would do if you were printing onto paper, I need to set up some file dimensions. I'm going to set up a file that has six inches by seven inches. It six inches wide by seven inches tall, because I wanted to create what are called Museum margins. They're going to be thin on either side and at the top, and they're going to be thicker at the bottom. But you can see right now that Lightroom's got an image here that isn't square. That's because I started off with a four by six layout. I'm going to need to make this square. I am going to image settings first of all, going to disable rotate to fit because down the track, if I bring a landscape or a portrait orientation image in here, I don't want Lightroom to think it can rotate them because it's going to look pretty awful if it does. Now I'm going to Layout, I want to square image, so I'm going to click here on "Cape square," that whatever happens, this image in here is going to be square. My paper was six inches wide and I want quarter-inch margins either side. That means that when I take off a quarter-inch here and a quarter inch here, that's half an inch. Half an inch of six inches is 5.5 inches. I want to wind up my cell size to 5.5 inches. I know I've got a quarter inch margin here and a quarter inch margin here. Now Lightroom's blindly telling me that I've got a quarter inch margin at the top of the page, but that is just not the case. It doesn't even begin to look like quarter of an inch. This is where Lightroom bites you, because it really just put stuff up there and you going, "Okay, don't look right to me." Let's see what we need to do. We've got a document that's six inches wide by seven inches tall. We got 5.5 inches worth of image. If we say seven inches minus 5.5, we've got 1.5 inches to play with. If we make a top margin of quarter of an inch. If we take that off 1.5 inches, we're left with one and a quarter inches. Well, we can force Lightroom to get this right by telling it that this bottom margin values incorrect, and we're going to put in 1.25 inches. Then Lightroom suddenly puts the image where it's supposed to be. You will find that this is a really annoying area of Lightroom in this layout because it can quite easily tell you things that are just not true. It always helps if you know how big your paper size is or how big your document size is, and then you do the subtractions and work it out for yourself. You might need a calculator, that's fine. You might need a sheet of paper to do it, but you need to force Lightroom to listen to you because unless you do, there's a good chance that it won't. We now have a museum style frame and every single one of these images, when I click on them, is placed inside this frame automatically. That's because I have allowed style of single image contact sheet. That's how single image contact sheet layout works. It's going to work pretty well for us. So far, so good. We're going to come back in the next video and put some information here before we go ahead and print the result.
3. Frame an Image - Part 2: If you're a professional photographer or a keen amateur, you'll probably want to put your information on the images that you print. I'm going to show you how you can do that now. We're going to the page option and we're going to turn on Identity Plate. Now, it's very difficult to say this, I'm just going to drag it down here to where it will go. You can see that I have an identity plate that just rather blindly says Helen. Well, we can improve on that by clicking here on the drop-down list and I'm going to click "Edit". Because I'm going to create a identity plate that I can use. I'm going to make my text black although it doesn't really matter what color it is, I'm going to show you in a minute why. For the font, I'm going to use Myriad Pro. Let's just go and find that. Now I'm going to type my details. I'm typing Helen Bradley a few spaces, a dash, a few more spaces photography, if you wanted to put some special character in here, you could do so as well. Now before you click "Okay" to use this, let's save this. I'm going to click on the custom link, I'm going to choose Save As. I'm just going to call this HB details. But you can call it anything that you like that will remind you later on that this is this identity plate. I'll click "Save" and then "Okay". Now you can see this has changed to Helen Bradley photography and I can drag it to re-size it. You can also position it on the screen. Unfortunately, Lightroom does not give us the ability to know when we've got it centered. You're just going to have to eyeball it and hope that you've got it right. You can of course just re-size it by just dragging in on the corner handles and it will be resized in proportion. Now if you look at this and think that the text is fine but the color is not, you can come over here and click "Override Color" and then select the color that you want to use instead of the color that was built into the original identity plate. You can do this for text identity plates. Now that you've got everything looking the way you want it to look, you can go ahead and print it. Right now I have one image selected here. If I want to print all of these images, I'll need to click on one, Shift click on the other. You can see I have a six page document. Now if this went to the printer, I would just have six sheets of paper. Because I'm printing to file, I'm going to end up with six files. I'm going to click "Print to File" and I have some blog photos here, I'm actually going to call these gaming machines. This is going to be not only the folder name but also the name of the file. We're going to have a sub folder in here called gaming machines and these photos are going to be gaming machines 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. I'll click "Save". I've got a few things running at the moment, but the last of these is this file print job. Lightroom is now just going ahead and printing those images, so we would be able to have a look in that folder and see those images once they're printed. That file print jobs just completed, so if I open up that folder in Windows Explorer, here's the gaming machines folder and here are the images all printed in that folder. You can see each one of them is a square image and they've all got this identity plate associated with them. Back in Lightroom if you want it to be able to use this over and over again, you can create this as a saved print. Up here, you'll see Create Saved Print. We're going to click on that and we're going to call this square print with identity plate. Once I've done that, I can choose the location. Now, if I don't want it inside gaming machines, I don't have to put it there. I'm actually going to deselect that so it's just going to be a collection all of its own. I'll click "Create". Now the benefit of creating it as a collection all of its own is this. Let's go back to the library view. Inside square print with identity plate, this collection are the six images that were originally in the gaming machine area. But we just went ahead and printed those. I don't need them in here any longer. I'm going to click on one and Shift click on the other so they're all selected, I'm just going to delete them. But I have some London images here that are also all square images and they're in a collection. I'm going to grab all three of those and I'm just going to take them also into my square print collection. They're still in the London collection, photos don't move out of a collection just because you put them in another one. But here is my square print collection. Let's double-click on it. When I do, this is opening automatically in the print module and everything is set up exactly as we had it before. We could print just one of these images by just targeting one image. You can see we've got page 1 of 1, or we can click on one, Shift click on the last and we've got three images all ready to go to print. The benefit of taking a little bit of time to set these print jobs up is that you can then print these images using this print job at anytime. Essentially all you're going to do is go to the library, you're going to take an image from any collection anywhere, just drop it into this square print with identity plate collection, double-click on it and you'll be off and ready to print. Your project for this class is going to be to go and set this up for yourself. Whether you use square images, portrait, or landscape. Just go ahead and set up a print collection with your identity plate and print one image at least from that and share that image with us. I hope that you've enjoyed this class, I hope that you've learned something about creating custom print jobs in Lightroom. If you did enjoy this class and when you see I prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. These recommendations are going to help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Lightroom. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I'll read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
