[Tobers]

OK - after failing badly with the Lightroom export with watermark using the slideshow method, here's a way that actually works really well. This is for Lightroom 2 and above only.

Firstly, you need ImageMagick installed. This is a command line image manipulation application, but dont worry about that at the moment. Here's the download link.

Secondly, you need Timothy Armes's LR2/Mogrify Lightroom plugin. This puts a nice Lightroom-style interface onto the ImageMagick application. What this means is that a number of the common ImageMagick commands, like watermarking, text overlays, borders, are available in the Lightroom export dialogue box just like they were original Lightroom features. Cool! Here's the download link.

So, once you've installed ImageMagick on your PC, install the LR2/Mogrify plugin into Lightroom. When that's done, you'll see some new options at the bottom left of your LR export dialogue. Tell LR where the ImageMagick app is installed on your PC and you're sorted.

It took me about 15 mins to install, configure, and export my first watermarked bordered pic. And, being a part of LR, you can still export to Smugmug, Flickr etc as usual, but with watermarking, borders, text overlays etc etc.

I'm very happy. I've been after something like this for ages. Here's my first watermarked bordered image exported to Smugmug. Rejoice!

[imglink]http://tobers.smugmug.com/photos/446169561_Bi7ka-M.jpg[/imglink]

By the way, I made the watermark in Photoshop using white text on a transparent background, with the opacity set at 30%. ImageMagick can read PSD files directly.

Happy new year!

Tobers

[Tobers]

Just had a couple of questions by PM about installing plugins in Lightroom, so here's some info about how to do this...

Guide to installing plugins here.

First, you need to install the LR2/Mogrify plugin into Lightroom (LR). In LR, go to Library, click export, and in the export dialogue at the bottom left you should see Plugin Manager. Click it.

The LR/Mogrify plugin comes in a zip file. You should put the whole directory (LR2Mogrify.lrplugin) in a suitable directory on your machine. I have a directory under my Adobe Lightroom 2.0 directory called "Andys Plugins" where I put them all.

In Plugin manager, click "add", tell it where the directory for LR2Mogrify is, and you're sorted.

Then it's best to exit LR then start it again. Go to Lirbary module. Pick a picture and click Export. The export dialogue should now contain a load of "post process actions" under LR2/Mogrify on the left side. Select Mogrify Configuration and tell the plugin where you've installed the ImageMagick application.

Then select "Graphical Watermark" and put in details about your watermark location, size etc. Note that I use the plugin to resize my watermark to 50% of the image size automatically. This didn't work with a TIFF file of the watermark, but worked fine with a PSD file.

Click export and you're done.