Recently, I posted on how to quickly create fine art prints in Lightroom (check out that post here). An important part of doing that is to create a custom Identity plate and center it in the background. If it’s white, you’re set – the color of the canvas is white by default, so slight misaligns go largely unnoticed. If you have a colored background, though, things get ugly. This post details how to fix the problem.

The Problem

When you have an identity plate with an image of any color, you have to PERFECTLY align the identity plate on the stage. Easier said than done. In most other Adobe products, you get an align tool or a feature that snaps things to grid when you get close. Not the case with this feature in Lightroom. I found it literally impossible to perfectly align it, always leaving small slivers of white. Click the image below for an example.

The Solution

The only way I was able to solve this problem was to save my fine art print setup as a Template and then edit the template file.

1. Create a fine art print setup by following the steps in my previous post.
2. Save it as a Template by clicking the + sign in the Template browser panel, giving it a name and clicking the Create button.
3. Now’s the semi-tricky part. You need to locate that template file on your computer. In Windows Vista your templates are located at the following directory by default: C:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\ Lightroom\Print Templates. If you are on a Mac or Windows XP, you’ll need to consult Lightroom help for the proper location. Also, you may have saved your presets in a different folder (in the Catalog settings)- if so, look there instead.
4. Open the file of the appropriate preset name with a text editor. On Windows, you may need to right-click and choose Open With… and specify a program like Notepad.
5. Scroll through or use the search feature to find any line that shows identityPlatePosH or identityPlatePosV. You’ll want to set the number on the right side of the equal sign on that line to .5 for each. They are probably close to .5 already – but it needs to be exact. See the lines I highlighted in the screenshot below for an example. I changed the values here and in one other place in this file. This is actually easier than it sounds. Once the file is opened, the lines are pretty easy to scan through.

1. Save and close the file.
2. If Lightroom is still open, close and re-start it. If already closed, go ahead and start it up. When you go back to the Print module and click on your preset, you should see that the Identify Plate is perfectly lined up.
3. Repeat for any other fine art print templates you want to create. For example, I created one for portrait-oriented pictures and one for landscape-oriented pictures. The identifyPlatePosH and identityPlatePosV should be set to .5 in every case.

Lightroom’s printing capabilities are amazing. Its ease of use and variety of features blow me away! One of the things I like about it is the ability to create a fine art print, like the one shown above.

Outputting Your Fine Art Print to an Image – Finally!

Version 1 allowed you to send a fine art print to the printer, but if you wanted it in an electronic copy for e-mailing, sending to an online printer, or for posting on the web, you had to use another method, like Photoshop. Lightroom 2 changes all that. It now allows you to export the fine art prints you set up in the Print module directly to a JPEG.

Changing the Background Color of Your Fine Art Print

One thing that Lightroom 2 doesn’t allow you to do directly, though, is change the background color of the fine art print. It is always set to white. If you use the right steps, though, you’ll be able to create something with any background color you’d like. The rest of this post provides steps on how to change the background color of your fine art prints directly in Lightroom 2 and then export them to a JPEG (the color changing techniques will still work in Lightroom 1, you just won’t be able to export it to a JPEG).

How to Do It

We have 2 things going on here. First, we need to change the color of the background of the fine art print. Second, we need to output it as an image. Several steps require that you create an image outside Lightroom. I use Photoshop in the examples, but you could use any similar image editing program.

How to Change the Color

1. Determine the size you want your final fine art print to be. I find that an 8×10″ provides a nice size, especially when posting on the web or e-mailing. Any size could be used, though. You’ll also want to decide about how much area will be taken up by the photo and how much will be color and/or your logo or descriptive text. I choose to set my fine art prints to have more space around the image than others do.
2. Open Photoshop and create a blank document at the size you chose in step 1. If the fine art print will be used for the web/email/etc., set the resolution to 72. If you’ll be printing it, I recommend setting it to 300. Click OK.

1. Fill the document with the color that you’d like the background of your fine art print to be. Also, place any logos or other text in the document. Make sure to place them in areas that won’t be covered by a picture in the final fine art print. Most people place the logo/text directly below the image area.

1. Save the document as a .jpeg or .tiff file.
2. Open Lightroom and go to the Print module.
3. In the Layout section, set your margins and cell size as needed to have your image fill the fine art print as much/little as you’d like. I also typically check the Zoom to Fill option in the Settings panel. It makes sure that the image fills the entire available area. You can click/drag the image to position it as needed in its assigned space.

1. The key to changing the background color is to change the overlay. In many cases, this is used to simply place a logo or other text on the image. Go ahead and check the Identity Plate option and click the down arrow just below that setting and choose Edit. Click the Locate File… button and choose the file that you saved back in step 4. Once chosen, click the OK button.
2. Make sure that the Opacity and Scale sliders are both set to 100%.
3. At this point, your image may be hidden by your new frame. To move it behind the image, click the Render Behind Image option. You can click/drag on the background to position it correctly. [Update - positioning it exactly can be very difficult. Read this recent post on how to get it exact.]

1. Your fine art print is now ready to export as an image.

Output the Fine Art Print as an Image

Now that your fine art print is built, you can export it as an image.

1. Go to the Print Job panel. Select JPEG File from the Print to: drop-down.
2. Set the File Resolution to 72.
3. Set the appropriate JPEG Quality – I find that 80 is a good balance between quality and file size.
4. Set the Custom File Dimensions to the size of your document. Mine are set to 8×10″.
5. Set the Profile to sRGB, which is the preferred color profile when viewing your image on a monitor.
6. Once done, click the Print to File… button. Give your image a name and save it to a location on your computer.

That should do it. Hopefully you now have an image of your fine art print, with a different background color. I would recommend saving this as a print preset, which allows you to easily re-use it in the future.

A reminder of the final image…

Do you use Adobe Lightroom? Do you display any images at Flickr? If you answered yes, you should be using Jeffrey’s Export to Flickr Plugin. There are tons of different plugins available to get your pictures onto Flickr. If you use Lightroom, though, there aren’t any faster or easier ways than this plugin!

Why the Plugin Rocks

This plugin rocks because it makes exporting to Flickr as easy as exporting an image to your desktop. I really like the following features:

• Automatically uploads the photos to your account.
• It lets you place it into one of your existing sets.
• You can easily rename/resize.
• You can include Flickr tags.
• There are several nice features for overwriting existing images.

How to Use the Plugin

The following instructions are for use with Lightroom 2. Use with Lightroom 1 is very similar, though, and Jeffrey’s site has easy-to-follow information on its isntallation and use.

1. Download the plugin from Jeffrey’s page. He has a version for Lightroom 2 here and a version for Lightroom 1 here.

2. Unzip the plugin to a permanent place on your computer. I put mine in the same area as my Lightroom Catalog.

3. Open Lightroom and click File > Plug-in Manager…

4. Click the Add button.

5. Locate the folder that you unzipped – select the folder and click  Add Plug-in. Note that if you ever move/delete the folder, the plugin will no longer work – you will need to re-add it.

6. Moving forward, whenever you want to export a photo to Flickr, select the photo and click File > Export… (or if in the Library module you can click the Export… button in the bottom left corner).

7. Choose Flickr from the options menu at the top (see Figure 1).

8. You’ll need to tell the plugin which account to use – click the Authenticate to Flickr button. It will open a browser and ask you to confirm that you want to give access for Lightroom to talk directly to Flickr. Approve the questions.

9. When back in Lightroom, the Export dialog will still be open and several options will be available, including information from your Flickr account such as your available Sets. You can then choose your settings as appropriate, including size, Flickr set, etc. Click the Export button when done.

Figure 1 – Click to enlarge

Who Should Buy It?

Someone in need of a streamlined or more efficient/fun way to manage and edit pictures.

the Cost

$99 upgrade; $299 full license

the Good

Non-destructive local editing using a brush, dual monitor support, support for larger images.

the Bad

Speed when using certain settings, new features brings a new learning curve.

Adobe Lightroom is hands-down the most commonly used program on my computer when it comes to photography. So, it was an easy to decision to upgrade to version 2 when it came out earlier this week. I’ve had an opportunity to use it and have some initial feedback on what I like and what could have turned out better.

Also, check out the following links for more information on what’s new or for training resources.

Adobe Documentation

Training Support Center

My Favorite 6 New Features

The best news is that there are a TON of new, really great features. The core around many of these new features is reducing the need to go to Photoshop. 3 of my top 6 new favorite features eliminated the need to go to Photoshop – I can now do those things directly in Lightroom. That results in a big time saver.

1. Adjustment brush: The adjustment brush allows you to make non-destructive edits to just parts of your photo directly in Lightroom! Version 1 required that you make your adjustments to the whole picture – you needed to go to Photoshop to do anything to parts of the picture. This one feature nearly doubles my productivity. Also, Adobe did a good job implementing it (for the most part). The brush is natural and easy to use. It’s also very smart. When brushing the image, it can detect edges and only apply the adjustments to the areas it is supposed to. Very cool!
2. Open files in Photoshop without saving them: This is the #2 reason I upgraded. I do a fair amount of HDR and panorma shots – in the past when I needed to open several images to create one larger one, it saved each of the shots as a Photoshop file, even though I only needed one final pano. It resulted in tons of extra files (that were pretty large) filling up my hard drive. Well, no longer! No, you can open an image in Photoshop without having it automatically save it.
3. Larger file support (65,000 pixels): Previously, Lightroom would only store an image up to 10,000 pixels wide. That caused some major issues when stitching together multiple large images, which could result in at least 15,000-20,000 pixel widths. Now, Lightroom supports much larger file sizes – horray!
4. Print to JPEG: The Print area of Lightroom is so much fun to use. Printing is easy and highly configurable. One of the things I really liked in Lightroom 1 is creating fine art prints (prints that don’t fill the whole sheet and often have descriptive text or logos directly below them). Now, it’s even better. You can export those fine art prints, or anything else from the Print area to an image! That’ll make creating images for posting on this blog and in other areas much easier. I used to have to go to Photoshop to be able to do that.
5. Better sharpening: The sharpening section now includes all the same sliders as Photoshop, plus one or two extras. I used to pull almost every final image over to Photoshop for final sharpening. Not anymore! Lightroom can handle it all. It even applies some basic sharpening while exporting.
6. Dual monitor support: I can finally open up various parts of Lightroom on a second monitor, like the Grid view of all my pictures.

A few other nice things include: You can print picture packages, mixing multiple sizes of the same image onto a single page for printing; it upgrades well from Lightroom 1 – it pulled over all my pictures, settings, presets, etc.; you can save your print settings with your photos so that you can more quickly make reprints; better visual cues – for example, when you reject a photo, it now grays them out; vignettes that are based on the cropped part of the image (the old way would display the vignette on cropped out areas of the image, making it unusable in those cases); you can access collections (groups of photos) from the develop and output modules now, reducing the need to go back to the library just to choose a different set of photos to work on.

The Bad

The great new features definately make it worth the upgrade. There are, however, a few things that are causing me some heartache.

1. Adjustment brush speed: I usually like to check the setting that automatically writes any changes to the file directly into the file. In the past, that would slow things down a bit (it is faster for Lightroom to keep track of those changes instead of writing them into the file), but it was tolerable. With that setting checked the adjustment brush is almost unusable – it runs ridiculously slowly, forcing me to turn off that feature.
2. Sub collection creation : I use collections a ton – in fact, I create one collection with several sub collections on every one of my shoots. For some unexplainable reason, Lightroom made it a whole lot harder to create sub-collections.

The Final Word – Should You Buy It?

In some cases, product upgrades may not bring features that are applicable enough for everyone to warrant widespread upgrades. That is not the case for Lightroom 2, though. If you are a Lightroom 1 user (or just want to try it out), I would recommend purchasing Lightroom 2 without hesitation. The adjustment brush and better Photoshop support make this worth the upgrade all by themselves.

Stay tuned over the coming days and months for posts on how I use particular features.