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.

Tomorrow is my last class of the semester, and I head off to Poplar Stream Falls Hut and then Flagstaff Lake Hut for Saturday night. I’ll be scouting out good spots for the August Photographic Workshop that Rick Holt and I will be teaching. I hope the steady rain stops and I get some breaks with just overcast. I think I’m bringing an umbrella.

The photo below is totally unrelated to my trip, but I thought I’d post it anyway. It was taken last summer at Popham Beach on a spectacularly foggy morning.

Popham Beach, Maine

I’ve finally bit the bullet and am starting to learn how to use WordPress. So, this is my first entry, and I will slowly return return previous content and add new contact as time allows. Right now, things will change somewhat sporadically while I learn css and other features of WordPress.