Printing from Lightroom - Add Edge Effects
Ever since we released our PhotoPresets with One-Click WOW! with Jack Davis, we have started getting more and more requests for taking some of our other plug-ins for Photoshop® over to Photoshop Lightroom™ - specifically Genuine Fractals and PhotoFrame Pro. That makes sense as you might think (or have already been telling us), but right now, there's no official support within Lightroom for plug-ins. But there is a way to get frames around your images when using the Print module within Lightroom.
To get a border or edge effect on your image when printing from Lightroom, you need to add a graphical identity plate. Once you add one (or two or three) you can access them from the Identity Plate section in the Print Module. Here's how to do it.
Step 1
Within Lightroom, go to the Lightroom menu and choose Identity Plate Setup...
Step 2
Make sure the checkbox to Enable the Identity Plate is checked and then choose the radio button to "Use a graphical identity plate".
Click the Locate File button and navigate through the dialog box to find the file you want to use. It's important that you use a PNG file that you have saved with transparency. This is the important part. I've found that a 600 pixel by 400 pixel file works pretty good. If you make the file too big, Lightroom slows down considerably when you try to access the frame in the Print module and can take a while to remove it using the Identity Plate Setup dialog. I've printed several different frames that started out as 600 x 400 pixels on images up to 13 x 19 inches on my Epson R2400 and they look good.
After you've chosen your file, go up to the pop-up menu next to the Enable check box, and choose Save As... at the bottom. Give it a name that will help you remember what it is and then click OK.
Step 3
After you've added the frames you want, select the image you want to print and then go to the Print module. Make any necessary adjustments for print size, sharpening, etc and then click on the checkbox (if it's not already checked) for the Identity Plate.
Look closely in the rectangle below the checkbox and in the lower right hand corner, you'll see an arrow pointing down. Click on it and a menu will appear with all of your custom Identity Plates.
Now, just choose the Identity Plate you want to use and it will show up on your image in the center of the Lightroom window. Use the Scale slider to adjust the size or you can grab a corner or side of the frame and adjust the size directly over the image to be printed. You can position the frame however you want.
I've created a bunch (20 to be precise) of frames using PhotoFrame Pro 3.1 in Photoshop CS3 and saved them out in the Identity Plate-friendly PNG format. You can download them here for free. Feel free to use them however you want within Lightroom.
If you download them and use them, please send me an email and let me know how you like them. I used a combination of frames from the Brush, Camera, Marker, Emulsion, Instant Film (aka Pola frames) and some traditional Vignette frames as well as a couple of simple 2 pixel stroke frames. I hope you enjoy them.
One more thing, if you install them and then want to remove them, that's simple. Go to the Identity Plate Setup dialog, click on the pop-up menu next to the Enable checkbox and click the Remove option. Lightroom will walk you through it from there.
[ Update 05-08-2007 ] See an earlier post from Sean McCormack on this technique with credit given to Andreas Noren as the first person (even before the Adobe engineers!) who discovered this technique.