Thursday, 26 Mar 2009

Lr2/Mogrify: Setup Borders and Signature

I’ve been requested to write a summary on my borders and signature/watermark for Lightroom’s Mogrify plugin.

Mogrify is an Lightroom plug-in that allows you to transform (i.e. transmogrify) your pictures on the way out (read: during export). If you’re uploading to flickr as I do then perhaps you’d like to add a border or a watermark before your pictures hit the website.

Unfortunately and I have no idea why, Lightroom 2 does not offer this feature outside of its Print module. It does not allow you to batch add borders and watermarks. So Lr2/Mogrify fills in where Lightroom leaves off.

The good thing about Mogrify is that it’s versatile. The bad thing is that it doesn’t allow me to add my Lightroom-inherent “Identity Plate” with ease. That is to say that Mogrify plug-in does not allow me to place the Lightroom Identity Plate directly onto my pictures. Hopefully this is resolved in future releases!

But having a simple signature/Identity Plate, I duplicated it with Lr2/Mogrify’s “Add text” functions. So here we go!

The picture below shows my flickr plug-in combined with my Lr2/Mogrify plug-in:

First the borders, I wanted a double border; a black border but laced with an off-white inside border. You can have as many borders as you want (at least more than 2). For each additional border just click on the “+” button to the top right:

Now for the signature. First I had to add my first name “CHARLES” in grey. I chose LucidaGrande as the font and then chose the font size that I liked. Now the next part is important: Do you want it on the border? Or do you want the text on the image? For me, I wanted the text on the image itself. So I checked “before border is applied”. After you work through the other preferences like color, opacity, etc. the next part is your “Position” (I chose bottom left).

Now the most important part (and most time consuming) what are your inset? Insets are the number of pixels you want your text to be away from the position you selected. For example: I wanted “Charles” to appear 19 pixels after the left edge of the image and 12 pixels above the bottom edge.

Now for the second part of my signature. I needed “YEH” to appear after “CHARLES” but in a different color. That’s easy, select a different color and leave all the other settings the same right? WRONG. While your vertical inset doesn’t change, your horizontal inset now needs to account for the space that “CHARLES” consumes. If you leave all the settings the same, the word “YEH” will appear right on top of the word “CHARLES”. We need it to appear AFTER “CHARLES”. So we need to increase the number of horizontal inset pixels You’ll have chimp it because it depends on your font size and font type but I found that 96 pixels for the horizontal inset works for my name, font, and font size: