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[♪music♪] [Adobe TV Presents] The Complete Picture by Julieanne Kost] Hi, and welcome. My name's Julieanne Kost. In this episode of The Complete Picture, we are going to make our own identity plate in Lightroom. We're going to make our own identity plate here, starting in the library because I'm going to show you how to use it to kind of brand Lightroom to make it your own. That can be especially helpful if maybe you're using this as a sales tool or maybe just because you want to customize it. Then we'll take a look at how to use identity plates in the slideshow print and the web module. So let's begin here. I'm going to go into the Lightroom menu and come down to identity plate set up. Now if you're on Window, you're going to want to go up underneath the edit menu and come down to identity plate setups. You'll notice that it's right next to the edit watermarks, which is a really cool new feature in Lightroom 3. We're going to talk about identity plate setup, but you should just know that these both exist, because when we get to the slideshow or the print or the web, you should know that you can add a watermark over your image and use an identity plate. So kind of two different ways that you can put content on top of your images. So let's start with the identity plate set-up. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to turn it on, so we're going to enable it here. And you can see that I can either use a stylized text identity plate or I can use a graphical identity plate. So if I wanted to use a stylized text identity plate, all I need to do is type it in. So if I wanted to type in photography by Julieanned Kost, we can go ahead and type that in. Let's do it in all lower case. And then if I wanted to make changes to maybe just some of the type, I could by just selecting it like you would do in any text editor. And we can go ahead and make that part bigger and maybe change the color by clicking on the color swatch here. So let's make that a bright red. And there you can see that we've made those changes and it's displaying those changes up here in our little identity plate area. So if we like this, then what we should do is simply save it so that we can use it in the other modules. So let's save this as let's just say PBJK, and we'll just put text right after it. And maybe we'll put red just so that I remember that my text is red here. Save, and that now becomes part of this drop-down list. So that's how easy it is to make a text-based identity plate. If we want to use a graphical identity plate, all we need to do is click this radio button and it asks us to locate our file. Now, you can locate any kind of file, but, I will tell you, the best one would be a PNG file. The reason I say that is because PNG supports transparency, so that means I can have my logo, my transparent background, and then maybe it doesn't make as much sense here in the library module, but when I go to slideshow print and web it would be this nice logo on top of maybe if I have a gradient in my slideshow or something like that, it would just seamlessly integrate with it. So, I'm going to go ahead and choose. Let's see, what do I want? We could choose a banner or we could choose a logo. So here's a kind of different logo. It's a graphic file, but it basically says the same thing, Photography by Julieanne Kost. Or maybe we want to pick something like this. It doesn't look like anything and that's because it's actually my signature in white, because I want it to show up over the black. So let me just show you. If I pick the next one down, this is the PSD file, just so I remember what it was. So it's my signature over black, then I saved it as a PNG file without that black background. All right, so we'll choose that. You can see that now I have my signature in the upper left, and if I like this we'll just save this as signature. And I might want to put white. And that becomes my first graphical identity plate. Of course, the best thing about this is, like I said, once we save them, they become available in all of our other modules. Okay, before I leave this dialog box I just want to show you that on the right-hand side you can also customize how large the module names are. So if we wanted to make these smaller, we could bring them down to, well, 12 point, I think, is a little too small. Let's maybe go to 14 point. We can change the color, we can change the font. Everything that you can do to that stylized text identity plate you can do right here to the module picker buttons, as well. So once we've got that set, we'll just click okay. So that's one way to create and stylize your own identity plates. Now let's take a look at some of the examples over in slideshow print and web. So here's just a real simple example. I have my photograph here in the middle, and underneath I have my identity plate. The way you turn on or off an identity plate is in the overlay area. So we can just uncheck that, and it goes away. Check it on, it comes back. This little teeny tiny triangle here will allow me to pick from same set of presets or saved settings that I've done, or we can go in here and we can edit these. So, again, I can locate a file for the graphical identity plate or use a stylized text identity plate, anything I want. Let's go ahead and select that signature again. Click okay, and there's my signature. We can change the opacity of this and the scale. So I can go ahead and scale it up if I wanted to, and I can relocate it to any position. You can see the little anchor points. See how the anchor point here is adhered to the side of this line? That's kind of nice if you want, when you move from one image to the next, the identity plate to stay in a fixed location in relationship to your image. So if you have horizontal and vertical images, and you anchor, let's say, to the lower right of your image-- obviously we probably want that smaller, but you see the point--I would anchor it to the image so that when I transfrom from a vertical to horizontal it would always stay in the lower-right of my image. Or we can anchor this to the actual slide, so that now, regardless of the orientation-- whether it's horizontal or vertical--of my photograph, my signature would stay in the same spot. So that's just so you know where those anchor points are. And, of course, we can also change the opacity. I'm not sure if I said that or not, but I'm going to leave that fully opaque. Okay, so that's the identity plate and the slideshow. I think I just have one other example. Oh, right here, yeah, because I did want to show you-- in fact, let's go make this. Let's go ahead, and I'm going to change the layout of this a little bit. Let's go here. I'll show my guides, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to force my image to the far right-hand side, and I'm going to put a huge, graphical identity plate right here on the left. So we'll go back to overlays, choose the triangle, go to edit, and I'm going to go locate my file. So let's go to my identity plates, and this is going to be for my slideshow. I have got a vertical striped banner here on black, and it's a really big file, so it's not even displaying the whole file right here, but when I click okay you can see that it's replaced that. I can go ahead and enlarge this. So if you have a cool custom logo or something that you want to display, feel free to also load that up because I think a lot of people think their identity plates have to be really small, but they can be as large of a graphic as you want them to be. And then all we need to do, obviously, would be just to save this in our template browser, and that would be accessible and we go and we select other images that we want to work with. Okay, let's go over to the print module. Now in the print module here, this example doesn't have an identity plate, but we could quickly add one. In fact, it might be kind of nice to kind of lower these. We've got this nice grid of nine images, but I'm just grabbing the top margin here and dragging it down a little bit, because that will give me a lot of space for my identity plate. So now we just need to scroll down, and in the page area that's where we're going to get our identity plate. So I'll go ahead and click to turn that on, and you can see the last time I was in here, I actually just used a text identity plate. I just typed in the word proof, and I told it to render on every single image. So that's kind of another use of the identity plate. We can also turn on a watermark, so now I can have both my identity plate and my watermark sitting on top of the same image. Okay, but let's say I don't want the word proof because I've already got my watermark. So let's swap this one out. Again, we could go use our signature, but instead of putting it on top of every single image, let's just put it up here at the top. So you can see it would be really easy for you to brand maybe some proofs that you are going to send to your clients by just adding your own identity plate. Okay, some other examples here. We've already talked about the proof one, so what does this look like? That one just has the watermark, and that one has the logo. Here it's just kind of a reverse logo in that it's black and the back of the page is white. And you just set the page background color right here under the page option, so that's a real easy thing to do. Let's scroll down here. What we were using a minute ago was just the first layout engine here, the single image or contact sheet layout, but we can also go down and use the custom engine. So let's say, for example, we want to put two photographs on a page, and this is really easy. This is a new feature of Lightroom 3. If you put multiple cells on a page, then you can simply drag out your images to fill those cells. And here's my identity plate here. So that's another good example of that. Let's scroll down a little bit more and maybe look at a diptych here. Here's another example. Let's select more than one image again. So we've got our two images next to each other and the identity plate, which is just a logo right below it. And again, one more example here. Here's a single image with an identity plate. However, I think that the identity plate is white, so it's not showing up. So let's come down here. Yep, sure enough, there it is. It's white, so let's pick a different identity plate, maybe my studio logo. Oh, and look at this. This is interesting. You can also rotate the identity plate, which most people do miss because it's just this little option right here. See how it's rotated negative ninety? If you click on that, you can rotate it however you want. Let's unrotate that, though, and just put that right down at the bottom. So there's some good examples of how you can use your identity plate in the print module. And last, but not least--oh, there's one more I want to show you. Everybody always asks me, "How do you add edges?" "Can you add edges in Lightroom?" Most of the time I tell people to go to Photoshop. But if you just want to print out all these images with the same edge, we can go right down here and you can see that I have an identity plate, and look at it. All it is, is it's a Photoshop file. Well, that's not really true. I created it in Photoshop. It's a white file, it's got a white outline here, and then it's got these black edges. And we can actually go take a look at it if you want to. I can go ahead and say edit, and then we can say locate the file, just so you can see it a little bit bigger. This would be in my print area. So here it is, it's an 8-byte, 8-inch image at 150 pixels per inch, because that's going to be just fine because they're just kind of these messy edges, and it's a PNG file. This whole center area is transparent, so that when we add this-- it's going to warn me that it's too big, but I'm going to use it anyway-- when we add this, this is what I get is this great transparent area on the inside and then my edge. Then it goes to white. So that's just one more example. Okay, over in the web module, you can see here that I'm just using an identity plate up at the top. One thing I will just note is that when I do this, typically, I don't add the site title because we could add more information in here, but then it just gets really crowded up there at the top. So if you don't need the site title, because a lot of people don't realize that if you just leave that blank and then tap the tab key, it will actually change the template and it will change the spacing there so that you can have this great identity plate that's custom to your studio and then just not include a title there. So that's one example of it, and then I was just going to show you another example, maybe, as a flash example. Here I've got my identity plate, and what I've noticed is that I actually wanted it smaller here. So you might need to play around a little bit with the size of your identity plate. The other thing is, when I made this identity plate, so I think it's 43 pixels high; it's not very big. I have a slight indent, so you can see I didn't want it to start way over flush left. I wanted it to start like right above view and right above where my little thumb nails were, so my Photoshop file actually has a little bit of extra black space on the left-hand side, just so that it looks good when I use it in this template. All right, and if we just scoot down here. Sorry, I did forget to show you where it was. You just go under the appearance panel, and that's where your identity plates are going to be. Just like all the other modules, you select them here, or you can go in and edit them. All right. Excellent. So that, hopefully, gave you a good overview of all the different ways that you can use identity plates in Lightroom. I think it's a great way to customize it, especially if you're using it in your sales room and you've got your own logo up here. And then it also helps you customize all your slideshows and when you print out all your images, as well as your website. My name is Julieanne Kost. Thanks for joining me. I hope you'll join me again on the next episode of The Complete Picture. [♪music♪] [Executive Producer, Bob Donlon; Producer, Karl Miller] [Director, Kush Amersinghe; Post-Production, Erik Espera][Adobe TV Productions]