Creating a Background grid with Lightroom

Here's a little tutorial on creating a 5X5 grid of images to use as a background on Twitter or MySpace, etc.

Site win with LRB Portfolio

Sven Bergmann recently won a German IT company website competition with LRB Portfolio. PC Welt were looking the best designed site with good quality photos, information and originality. Sven used LRB Portfolio to design his site, and took 1st place receiving a €522 prize. The Google translation of the article is here, while Sven's site can be viewed at http://www.digitaleraugenblick.com/.

Congrats Sven!

Rotating Images

Shortcut of the day: Control/Command [ will rotate left(Counter Clockwise), while Control/Command ] will rotate right (Clockwise).

You can also rotate inside the Gird cell with expanded view on, (press J to cycle between cell views) and via the Toolbar with Rotate ticked.

LRB Portfolio updated to version 2.2

LRB Portfolio, the website plugin for Lightroom 2, has been updated to version 2.2. Along with bug fixes, there have been a number of additions to the program. The key addition allows a gallery index page with thumbnails slices of gallery images to link to the galleries. A sample of this in action in a real website can be seen at http://musofoto.com. This brings to 3 the number of options that can be used as the home page: A home page with a single photo (with optional text), A gallery index page, or a gallery page.

Other additions include removal of the image on the blank page to allow for video links etc. Text on the non gallery pages can be aligned left, right, or justified. Images can also be aligned, in this case, left, centre or right. A regular request is to have the names of the form titles changeable in the Contact form has been granted.

Finally an annoying bug that broke Gallery 1 only, has been fixed. Although internally the number 20 is used, Lightroom displays the number as 20.00 in the "number of images" for the gallery. This prompted a number of users to enter a decimal point when changing the default. Due to the way Lightroom handles text input, this was then interpreted as a string and caused the gallery to fail with an error. Other galleries were not affected as internal maths forced Lightroom to see it as a number. This issue has now been corrected. Lightroom still shows the decimal point, but it no longer matters if the user enters the decimal. This was actually hard to pin down, because it only affected the first gallery. I had tested the decimal point in other galleries, but not the the first one. A mix of Jorge Parra and finally Atma Singh lead to testing Gallery 1 again, revealing the error.

The UI has been updated with the changes and additional material, including more hints and tips, have been added to the User Guide. I will be creating a video to go along with this shortly.

All further information about the gallery, including purchase information and User Guide can be found at LRBPortfolio.com. Current users can download this update from their download link. As mentioned previously, this update also comes with a price increase to €15 to cover the ongoing costs of producing the additional features and bug fixes.

Read More

Update: If you're getting a error relating to com.lightroom-blog.lrbportfolio, try downloading again

Watermarking Web Galleries with LR2/Mogrify

One feature sorely lacking in Lightroom is a good watermark on Export. Using the fabulous 3rd party plugin LR2/Mogrify from Timothy Armes solves this issue for a straight export, but unfortunately post process plugins are not available in the Web Module. So how can we do it?

Well for my recently launched music photography website Muso Foto, I wanted nice (i.e. not the normal Lightroom one) watermarks on my images. Nothing intrusive, but something that doesn't take from the image.

Here's the steps I took:

1. Create the web gallery as you like. Leave the Add Copyright Watermark off. Also create a nice logo using the Identity Plate. Set the Quality high (like 95 or so).

2. Export the gallery to a folder (shortcut Cmd/Cntrl J).

3. In Library navigate to the folder you created via Import. Locate the folder with the large images. With LRB Portfolio, this is called 'large'. In the default HTML, this may be something like 'bin/images/large'.

4. Import this folder in to Lightroom via 'Add to Catalog'.

5. Select all the images in the folder.

6. Click Export.

7. Using Files to Disk, I set up the export as below: Jpg, sRGB, quality 80, subfolder of original folder.

8. In the Post Process Actions section, I click on Graphical Watermark and Inner Border.

9. For the Watermark, I navigate into the Gallery folder exported earlier and find 'logo.png'-the exported Identity Plate. I do this to keep the watermark and logo consistent. It helps create a 'brand'. With a little calculation, I work out a size I'm happy with and enter it.

10. I also want a semi transparent bar across the bottom which encompasses the logo. With the logo being 24px high, I opt for a 25px high Inner border on the bottom. I select Black as the colour and reduce the transparency to 50%.

11. With all this set up, I hit export.

12. From there I move the images from the subfolder up a level and overwrite the original gallery images-this is in Finder/Explorer.

13. In Lightroom I remove the still selected images from the Library with the delete key and choose 'Remove from Library' as my dialog option. After all I don't want to delete the image files I worked hard to create!

14. Finally I upload the Gallery.


Notes: Lightroom renames '-' to '_' and forces the filenames to lower case when exporting for Web Galleries. For this reason I use the actual gallery images, which will retain their correct names for the HTML files. This is the only reason why I simply don't export the files directly from Lightroom, overwriting the original gallery files.

LRB Portfolio: Adding single images to the menu

While there is an option to have either text or images in the menu in LRB Portfolio, sometimes you only need one image there. A prime example would be if you were link to an external stock site where you are represented. I'm not with Retna, the sample presented here, but I know a few people who are, so I thought it would make a nice example.

All you need to do is put the image in the resources/images folder, as explained in the User Guide. Then instead of entering text in the External Link name, add a standard img call. In this case <img src="resources/images/retna.jpg" height="25">. The image will now appear in the menu.

Video and Monkey Business 3

Today I'm working on Lightroom videos for Mark Cleghorn. For those not familiar with Mark, he's a great photographer/educator on this side of the pond. And an all round gent at that too. Amongst other things, Mark has a whole series of videos done for Lastolite, on using their product.
Anyhow, I'm heading over to the UK for one of his seminars on the Monkey Business 3 tour. The London date to be precise. It's £25 for the day long seminar with trade show. Let's face it, that's a steal in this current climate. The seminar is a mix of theory and practical and I have to say I'm looking forward to it.

LRB Portfolio 2.2 progress and feedback request.

With the madness of the Galway Arts Festival and the Galway Races now over, my insomnia has given me time to work on new features for the next release of LRB Portfolio (version 2.2).

First up is that the annoying file opening when using Google analytics has been tamed. Thanks to Matthew Campagna for help with that.

The main change though, and it's a big enough feature for a dot release, is that you can now create a gallery index as the home page. As you can also have either Gallery 1 as the home page, or the original homepage, this needed quite a lot of trickery in the background. I've also allowed for 2 image widths so you can accommodate all 6 galleries in a reasonable width, or have a wider set for lower gallery numbers. The selection also takes care of the width to keep the index images centered. Yes, that was fun :).

Anyhow here's a sample gallery to look at and get feedback from. LRB Portfolio 2.2. Dev Sample Website

Update: I've added a 2nd gallery version with a slightly different layout, different colours, and a normal scrolling gallery, rather than the CMotion one in the first version: LRB Portfolio 2.2. Dev Sample Website Version 2


Please let me know how this looks in your browser. What do you think of it? Please remember that if you haven't used this plugin that all the colours are chanagle, as well as a host of other features including image size. These sample galleries are sized for people with low screen res and slower internet. Yours can be as wide or big as you like. What I'm asking for feedback on is the gallery index page idea. Is it worth adding?

Further feature-wise, I'm in the process of allowing you to set the text alignment for the Home, About, Contact and Blank pages. Also I'm adding the ability to edit the Contact Form titles (like 'Name', 'Email Address', etc).The base code is in place and working, but I need to add the text controls.


Also, LRB Portfolio has been on introductory offer forever, so with this release, I will be increasing the price to €15. Upgrades to existing users for all version 2 releases will be free of course, so those buying now can benefit from the lower price.

Saving your Virtual Copies to XMP.

As a tip that has come up again on Twitter, I thought I'd put it in the blog. This came via a tweet from Victoria Bampton originally.

By default Lightroom only store information about Virtual Copies in the catalog. This is a pain if you lose the catalog, or want to access the Virtual Copy outside Lightroom. Fortunately there is a work around. When you get your Virtual Copy to the finish point, save a Snapshot. If you now go back to the Master/Original image from which you created the copy, you'll notice the Snapshot is also available to the Master. This means the settings from the Virtual Copy are easy to recreate even if you lose the catalog without a recent enough backup.