Covers:
How to embed text watermark
How to embed graphical watermark
How to save the set watermark for future use

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1. Tutorial: How to Add Border with Copyright Watermark in Lightroom
2. How To: Copyright Signature Watermark On Lightroom 2 Using Mogrify Plugin
3. Video Tutorial: HDR Landscape with Lightroom

This is a Lightroom develop preset that I made to make the model’s skin smoother. It will work for most portraiture.

Right click and save to download ‘Victor’s Smooth Skin preset’

It makes use of the Lightroom 3 noise reduction engine. Note that this preset will also make other aspect of the picture a little bit smooth too (not too noticeable). So if you want to just smooth the skin without smoothing the other part, feel free to use Photoshop.

The Settings

Sample Image:

No, she's not nude. And click the pic for full size comparison.

Right click and save to download ‘Victor’s Smooth Skin preset’

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Elise.Studio

Today, I taught a workshop about photo post-processing with Adobe Lightroom beta 3 to several Monash University student.
It was quite fun.

Most students never used Lightroom before, so we gotta go from the start.

I covered:
- Importing
- Flagging (Pick, color, star)
- Croping, Brush, Graduate Filter, Spot removal
- The basics of sliders on develop module
- Exporting
- Develop presets and Exporting presets

To my surprise, the whole thing only took less than an hour. I use 11 sample images to show stuff. Couple of landscapes and portraits.

Seems to me that people always tries to compare Lightroom to Photoshop. We had to explain the concept of ‘non-destructible image editing’ as opposed to layering in photoshop.

All in all, it was fun and I will record a screencast of the workshop on my mac later. Stay tuned.

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I got a question from my friend earlier this week when she watch me as I edited my photos. She was asking me how did I manage to crop my photos freely as Lightroom always restrict her cropping. By default Lightroom lock your aspect ratio to the width x height of your photos.

So how do you go around breaking it?

Its really simple, but I’ll give you step by step to make it even more simple.

1. Open Lightroom
2. Go to Develop Module
3. Press “R” or crop on the desired photo

You should see the cropping rectangle and the guidelines.

4. Right click on the photo and select “Constrain Aspect Ratio” or just press “A”

You can toggle the Constrain Aspect Ratio whenever you want.

5. Voila! Now you should be able to crop your photos freely without restriction!

How did you go with that?

I believe this simple steps should help you crop with more freedom from now on. If you can’t get it to work, just let me know and I’ll try to help you further.

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. Tutorial: How to Add Border with Copyright Watermark in Lightroom
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3. How To: Copyright Signature Watermark On Lightroom 2 Using Mogrify Plugin

The plugin we all know and love is updated. The new version is pretty much the same as the old one, but you are able to set % of width/height instead of pixels on the watermarking to make sure the watermark scales with landscape/portrait.

Version 3.00, 23rd July 2009

• Added support for inner borders!
• A checkbox in the outer border sections allows you to manipulate the four borders at the same time.
• Automatic update has been improved (although you won’t see the effect until the next version…)

Version 2.20, 14th July 2009

• Border widths can now be a percentage of the longest/shortest side.
• Problems related to the saving of presets containing multiple borders have now been solved (I hope!).

Source: Timothy Armes Blog
Download: LR2/Mogrify

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. Tutorial: How to Add Border with Copyright Watermark in Lightroom
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Couple of days ago I posted several photos from Lake Mackintosh, Tasmania and received quite a number of good feedback from my friends and the online community. Numerous people asked me on how to post process the photo. So here I am, presenting to you, my FIRST video tutorial.

Download Link: HDR Landscape with Lightroom (6mb)

What do you need?

You just need to have lightroom 2.0 upwards and the “PH in the city” preset.
I totally forgot where I downloaded it and couldn’t find it at Google. So here it is.

Download Link: PH_In_the_city

Why does this picture look interesting?

I, for one, believes interestingness depends on the eyes of beholder. But in this photo you can find several composition techniques.

1. Rule of third. Actually three of them. The wood, the mountain, and the skyline (1/3 of the frame)
2. Symmetry. Reflection of the mountain and sky creates this effect.
3. Frame. From using vignettes.
4. Foreground and Background interest. Landscape has to consist of background AND foreground to be interesting. in this case, the wood and pebbles as foreground, the mountain as midground, and the sky as background.
5. The serene feeling of the perfect still lake

I hope you benefit from my teaching, and please leave a comment

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. Photo Gallery of Lake Mackintosh, Tasmania
2. Tutorial: How To Use Rule of Thirds in Digital Photography
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Lately my photos has been filling up my 320gb hard drive (around 55 thousands photos) so I decided to move them to my 1tb external hard drive. I moved them conventionally with Windows Explorer. All is well until I opened Lightroom and noticed all of my folders are marked missing. And to make things worse, Lightroom doesn’t automatically detect the new location of my photos. So I was left with two choices in this matter:

1. To delete the current catalog and re-import everything
2. To right click my folders one by one and choose “Locate missing folder” (Lightroom doesn’t support multiple folders locating!)

I decided it was too much pain to follow option two, so I deleted my catalog and re-import my photos. Of course I lost all my edits, but I seldom look through my old edits anyway except for showing my friends how its done.

Lesson of the day

Now for this to not happen to you in the future, you got to remember to move the folders with Lightroom, not Windows Explorer or stuff like that.

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1. How To: Copyright Signature Watermark On Lightroom 2 Using Mogrify Plugin
2. 7 Reason to Use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
3. How To: Fantastic Mysterious Effect Using Lightroom “300″ Preset

So I posted a tutorial on how to create copyright signature with Lightroom sometime ago. I got some question from readers on how to put the copyright watermark into the border to not obstruct the photo itself. Now the answer is using Mogrify plugin to add border around the photo along with the watermark. Now I know this sounds really obvious, I just thought to write this.

First Step: Install Lightroom and Mogrify Plugin

We have already discussed what do you need and how do you do this on my previous post, check it out here.

Second Step: Export your photos (one or more)

Once you press the export button, it will summon the export screen. You should be able to see something like this:

Add the border setting from the left hand side, then click the (+) button to add border.

Remember that you can add as many border as you like. Most people will only use one border like this:

Example of single border copyright

And this is the setting for that particular border:

Notice the bottom border is 40px instead of 20px of the other sides, uncheck the "before border is applied" button, and make sure the text annotation is smaller than the border width.

Now lets see the example of the double border:

The first border is white with 10px on all side, and the second border is black with 5px on all side except 30px on bottom to show the text annotation with 25px text

Things to remember:

Overall, this process is fairly easy and simple, but there are several things you need to make sure is done.

1. Contrast of the border and text annotation. People should be able to read the text easily.
2. Do not abuse the border. 20 borders with different colors won’t make your photo look better.
3. Make sure you un-check the “before border is applied” on the text annotation setting.
4. Make sure the border width is more than the text size if you don’t want the text overlap the photo.
5. If you like the plugin, please consider donating some money to the creator. Do it here.

That’s it for today folks! Until next time!

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This tutorial is for those who are still using Lightroom 2. If you have Lightroom 3, please go to this tutorial

Timeless - My newest favourite photo

I have been getting some question from my friends and reader on how to put a signature on your photos with Lightroom. Before knowing this technique, I used Photoshop to manually embed signature on lightroom one by one. Now with Lightroom, we can automate the process to watermark all your pictures in one go. Now lets get to this.

What do we need?

1. Adobe Lightroom
2. Mogrify Plugin
3. ImageMagick
4. Photos! Lots of em!

Now that we have all that, what should we do?

Lets do another step by step tutorial.

Assumption: You already processed your photos and have them ready to be exported through Lightroom. And you have already set up the mogrify configuration by following these steps

Step 1: Select (one or more) Pictures that you wanted to be watermarked, and click export

The free trial version of mogrify plugin only supports 10 exports at one go. Donating to the plugin will break that limitation forever. You can donate any amount of money you think is appropriate to the creator

You will notice the newly added options to lightroom export module. Click on the "Text Annotation 1" to summon the panel on the right. Of course you can add more than one texts annotation. Even graphical watermarks.

and… click export :p

Step 2: Check out your newly exported photos on your export folder

What? That was it? No more steps? Yes, that is all the steps you need to put signatures into your posts.

example of obnoxious gigantic watermarking that you should not do. No matter how great the photo is, people will get annoyed.

Thats it for now folks! Until next time!

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1. Tutorial: How to Add Border with Copyright Watermark in Lightroom
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Some of you might wonder what Lightroom is? The short answer is “another image processing software from Adobe beside Photoshop and Elements”. The long answer would be “a freaking awesome software to help you process hundreds of photos in short amount of time by maximizing your work flow while utilizing presets and databases.” It might sounds scary at first, but I’ll tell you why I love this pretty piece of software.

Link to Lightroom homepage: Click here

Default Lightroom interface. Click to enlarge.

1. Sleek Folder System

The folder system makes it really easy to find the photos you wanted without long searching. I have more than 40.000 Images in my database right now, from 2003 to 2009, but i never had any problem looking for the event I shot 2 years ago.

2. Easy Metadata Searching

For example, in one event you shot an event with Nikon d80 and d300, while your friend shoot with Canon 40d. After the event, you download all the photos from the three camera to the same folder. You want to put watermark on your pictures, but not on your friend’s, so what can you do? You can enable Lightroom to only display the images from specific camera type or specific lens type.

3. Flagging System

After you download that 346 photos from your memory card, you scan it quickly, and you find several images you like, and several you don’t like. With traditional folder system, you will have to pick them up and putting the ones you like in another folder or deleting the ones you don’t like so u do not clutter the folder. In Lightroom, you can simply tag the picture as “flagged” which means you like it, or tag the picture by color (Lightroom provides 7 color tag you can use), and you can tag a picture as “Rejected”. Note that whatever tag you use, it doesn’t affect the picture in any way. You then can choose to display only pictures that has “red” tag, maybe its the pictures that has cats on it (for example), or chose the flagged photos for export to web later. You can always change the flag anytime.

4. Keyword Tagging

OK, lets say you shoot lots of koalas in many different occasions and you want to display all the picture with koalas from your database. If you use the tagging system, this is as easy as one click of a mouse. You can tag a picture with whatever keyword you wanted. You can even tag the picture with more than one keyword, just like blog posts.

Lightroom develop screen. Arsenal of weapon for you to exploit. Click to enlarge.

5. Awesome Array of Development Tools

No editing software is complete without editing, right? Of course! Lightroom has one of the most powerful and versatile development tools I’ve ever seen for photo editing software. Well, except Photoshop and Elements. Lightroom provides those tools you can use:

• Histogram Checker/Slider
• Red eye removal
• Dust removal (clone/heal)
• Cropping
• Graduate Filters
• Brush (exposure, saturation, contrast, clarity, sharpness, exposure)
• Basic Adobe Camera Raw sliders (White balance, exposure, blacks, saturation, etc)
• Tone Curve
• Grayscale Sliders
• Split Toning
• Detail (sharpening, noise, chromatic aberration, etc)
• Vignettes
• Camera Calibration (colors sliders)

Wow… That’s quite a lot of tools eh! All the photos you see on my blog is processed with ONLY Lightroom tools. I haven’t used Photoshop layers yet. I’m sure Photoshop can do more, but i’m happy with Lightroom because of its simplicity.

6. Develop Presets

With that many develop tools, chances are you will be using some similar setting for most of your pictures. So instead of repeating to slide the bars to the same place, why don’t we make a preset? Basically a preset is a saved setting of your developments. You can set it up by yourself, download it from the internet, or use the ones Lightroom provided for you.
I think you have seen the two post processing tutorial i wrote before. Both of them utilizes the 300 preset i got from mikelao’s website. Now know that the 300 preset is just one the many i use in regular basis. I’ll be writing more post processing tuts later on.

Lightroom printing screen. Enough control for you to customize your prints. Click to enlarge.

7. Printing Interface

Chances are, if you are serious in photography, you will want to print your masterpiece and hang it on the wall. Now Lightroom comes with a really good printing interface. It uses templates you can choose. Again, the template work the same as presets, so you can download the templates from the internet to use.

There are two more feature in Lightroom that i never use, which is Slideshow generator and Web Gallery generator. If you are interested in making a slideshow or gallery, this will be a plus for you.

This article by no means try to convince you to use Lightroom. And no, Adobe didn’t pay me to do this review. All of the points above is written according to my personal experience with Lightroom.

I hope you enjoy the article, and drop me a comment if you like it.

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