MaineSight

For those of you that use White House Custom Color for making greeting cards, I’ve made two (5″x7″) Lightroom 2.6 RC templates (one for a Landscape format, and the other for a Portrait format). These presets make a uniform 0.25″ white border around your photos. I made these on a Mac, and don’t know if they’ll work on a PC, though I’d love to know if they do.

To install the templates, first download the zipped Presets File and unzip it. Then you have two options:

1)  With Lightroom no running, drag the two template files to the appropriate location for Mac users: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Print Templates/ then you should be done.

2) Or, you may, while in the Print Module, right click on the “User Presets” folder (in the Templates Panel) and choose “import”. Find the files you’ve unzipped (NOT the .zip file!) and install them. You should be ready to go.

To use the templates, here’s my workflow: take an image that I want to turn into a greeting card, make a virtual copy, and crop it to a custom aspect ratio of 6.5 x 4.5. This will fit exactly in the either template without having to use the “zoom to fill” feature which will effectively crop your image in a manner you cannot control. Then choose the format that fits your image, and click “Print to file”. The preset makes a jpeg file with an embedded Adobe RGB profile which you can save to a folder of your choosing. Now you have the front of your greeting card. I then use Apple’s Pages application to make a back to the card which has relevant information about the image. I export (File>Export) that image as a pdf and then open it in Preview and save a 300 dpi jpeg to the same folder as the front image.  I then synchronize the folder and in Lightroom, and stack the front and back images, do appropriate keywording and I then have a print ready greeting card that I can submit using ROES to WHCC. Here’s what the back of my greeting cards look like:

The back image for the above greeting card.

By the way, don’t adjust the margins in the preset, even though it looks like I’ve messed up and made them non-uniform; the reason is that the WHCC cards are submitted in the dimensions 5.125″ x 7.25″ and are trimmed down (very accurately) to 5″x7″. As far as my experience goes, this trimming is performed symmetrically, and this allows me to make my templates so that the final trimmed card has a uniform border.

On a Thanksgiving Day family hike in Brooksville I came upon this bend in the trail and realized while photographing that even at 24mm, I am not not going to get a sharp focus across the image (at least not without a tilt shift lens), so I set up my tripod and cable release and made two exposures; one with focus in the foreground, and the other with focus farther back in the frame.

Once home, I opened the two raw images using PhotoAcute and combined them using the focus stacking feature. This is the first time I’ve used this feature, and it worked remarkably well.

I was just working on some images making print ready files for sending to my printer (White House Custom Color). I’ve made a template in Lightroom’s Print Module that (when a properly cropped) makes a jpeg file ready to upload and print. However, the below portrait format print image was accidentally used with a landscape template for a 5×7 greeting card, and them I was left with the bottom image, which, after realizing what had happened, I instantly liked. This led to a good 20 minutes or so of making different versions and playing around with the crop. Freeman Patterson has a great exercise where he has you place your tripod in one spot and make a 10-20 images. Its a fantastic exercise in seeing, and not altogether different than my little cropping exercise.




Next time I am at Schoodic Point (the location of these photos) I will return with fresh eyes, inspired by a happy accident.

I’m getting ready to sell prints and greeting cards for the indoor Brunswick Market at the old Fort Andross Mill. This is one of the images I hope will sell; it was made this summer at Camden harbor while waiting to depart to Mantinicus Island. Handheld, with the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS at 200mm.

Tamaracks, Durham, Maine. Processed with Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta.