Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I'm going to
show you how you can frame an image ready for printing inside Lightroom so you
don't even have to leave Lightroom
to add a frame to it.
Before we start on this process let's have a look and see what our end product
is going to be. I have here Lightroom open and you could do this in Lightroom
4 or 3 or 2. It's not specific to Lightroom 4.
I'm in the print module and here I have a series of images that I want to print.
And what I've done is I've created this frame that
now sits over this image. Now you can see that the frame pulls apart.
So this image can be altered. So for example I can just change the image
there,
move the frame back into position, and I'm ready to print this.
Now I can print it direct to the printer or I have these going to
print to JPG because I want to use them on my blog.
Now we sell these frames on projectwoman.com, and I'm using one of the
frames that we sell. But let's have a look and see how you can do that with
your own hand-drawn frame or how you could use one of our frames to do it.
And to do that we're going to start in Photoshop if you're using your own frame
because you'll need to create it yourself.
Here I am inside Photoshop and I have a frame that I've already created. Now what I
did was I took a piece of white drawing paper and a nice thick black felt tip pen
and I drew this frame.
And then I scanned it in using my scanner. But if you don't have a scanner you
could always just take a photograph of it.
Now I've cleaned this up. And what I've done is I've
cut out the middle so this is hollow in here. If I add a new layer below this, and
let's just go and get my Tools Palette, and let's drop some color in there so that
you can see that it's actually a hollow frame.
So let's just go and get a different color to the frame color.
And I'm just adding a filled layer beneath it so you can see that there
is actually a hollow in the middle of the frame. And that's really important
because that's where your picture is going to go.
And here my frame I've added a boarder to it, so a plain blue border.
But you don't have to have a border. You could remove it.
And this is just white with black. So once you've got your frame created
what you'll want to do is to save it, and I've saved mine as a PNG file.
Now the reason I've used PNG is twofold. First of all you get a
nice flattened document. But PNG will store transparency.
You can't store transparency in a JPG file. So you can't use JPG for this because
you won't have a hole in the frame for your picture to sit in.
So what I've done is create it as a PNG with this hollow cutout because when it
comes to Lightroom
that hole is still going to be there.
So having saved it to disk, let's just do that, File Save As. I just want
to put this in a place that
I know where it's going to be. So
I have a folder here for video images. So I'm just going to put my hand-drawn frame in
there and just click Save
so I know exactly where it is. I'm just taking the options here, just the standard
PNG options from Photoshop.
So let's close that out,
close down Photoshop for now and let's go and get Lightroom again.
Okay, so let's go and get a different folder of images because I don't want to start with
anything that we're sure of. And I know I've got some really nice
Safari West
animals. So let's go with the animals. And let's go to the Print Module.
And let's go to a
brand new layout. So let's close down this preview.
And I'm just going to go and start with a brand new layout. It can be anything
at all.
I would set up my page. And I want to be working in landscape.
I'm going to click Ok.
And I want this to go to a
JPG file. So I'm just going to set JPG there,
and I'm working in a landscape letter size image. So everything's looking
perfect there except of course that this is not what I want my print job to look
like.
I have an Identity Plate turned on. So I'm going to turn that off for now.
I'm going to get rid of these pieces.
Okay, so now I'm going to add my first image. So let's go and find an image that is in
landscape mode because my
frame is a landscape image. So
let's just go and get something. There's some distinctly not Safari images in this
folder by the looks of it.
I really like this one so I'm going to add it in here.
So I'm just placing it. Because we're using a custom package I can just drag and drop
the image
into position. And Lightroom won't let me skew this image so whatever I do with it
it cannot be skewed out of alignment.
So I'm just going to put the image there. And what I want to do is to put my frame over the
top. It looks like we've got a few settings coming in with this image such
as a photo border and an inner stroke. I'm going to take all of those off.
And now let's go and get our frame. And the way that we add the frame is from
the Page Panel here. We going to add it as an Identity Plate. So I'm
going to click to select Identity Plate. But I want to add my own so I'm going to click here
and choose Edit.
Now the type of identity plate I'm going to use is Graphical. So I'll select that,
and I'm going to locate the file that I created.
Now one thing I didn't mention that is critical is that the
dimensions of this frame need to be the same dimensions as the
image that you're working on. So I've made mine the size of a letter size
sheet of paper.
Now it's very large. That's fine. I'm going to use it anyway.
And I want to save this. So I'm just going to click Save As. And I'm going
to put this blue hand-drawn frame
and click Save,
so now I can use it anytime and click Ok.
And the frame is now added to the image. And I can size it. Now
the reason why I have to
make sure that it is a letter size frame is that Lightroom won't let me scale it any
larger than letter size. So I have to make sure that it's in the correct
proportions before I start.
And I've got grids and guides turned off so we'll be able to see everything
really clearly.
Now the reason why the frame is in front, and we do of course want it in front but
we do need to check and make sure that it is in front,
is that Render Behind Image is not turned on. So if we had it behind image
than it would be behind the image. We want it on the top.
Now I'm ready to print that. And once I've printed that
I can then use it for another image. And all I'm going to do is move the
frame out of the way a little bit,
drag and drop a replacement image into position and then just put my frame back in.
Now I'm ready to print
the second image and then I could continue through to create
other images ready for printing. If I want to save this, and typically having
done the work of
setting this up I would want to save it, I can either create a saved print which will
save this print layout
and the image or I can just save the user template. So I'm going to click here.
I'm going to call this blue frame template.
Blue frame one up will tell me that it's going to be just one up,
one image on this, and just click Create.
And it's going here into User Templates.
And that means that I can select it any time in the future for any image at all,
and it's going to be preset for me.
So there you have the ability to create your own framing for images inside
Lightroom.