Mastering Lightroom: Branding and Customization

Lightroom is an amazing program with a myriad of great features to improve the look of your photographs. In addition to all the image editing and cataloging tools, Lightroom also has some cool built-in features to make it a little more personal. In this short tutorial, I will show you how to brand and customize your favorite RAW converter. A little :)

1) Identity Plate

You can brand your copy of Lightroom for your photography business by inserting your logo to the top left corner of the software through the “Identity Plate” setup. You can get to the “Identity Plate Setup” by clicking on Edit -> Identity Plate Editor. Make sure to check the “Enable Identity Plate” checkbox, otherwise you will see the default Lightroom logo at the top left of the window. In the editor, you can either use a stylized text Identity Plate, or a graphical Identity Plate.

How Does It Look - Text Stylized text Identity Plate allows you to input any text you want to show at the left side of your Modules Panel. Use the drop-down menus to set the font, style, size and color of any text (or a part of it). Using text makes it very easy and quick to change the Identity Plate at any time.

How Does it Look - Graphical Using Graphical Identity Plate allows for more flexibility – you can turn any image into an Identity Plate. Using PNG instead of JPEG format offers transparency, which, again, helps you make your logo blend in better with the graphical interface of Lightroom. One thing you need to be aware of is the height of the image you want to use – keep it at about 50-60 px, otherwise Lightroom will not fit it in the narrow Modules Panel.

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Social Media for Your Photography Business

Yesterday I took the plunge and joined 500px.com and uploaded some of my landscape photos. 500px is a great resource with lots of talented photographers. I have visited the site before and some of the photographs are breathtaking and inspiring (except for all that nudity that seems to dominate the site – had to turn it off from my profile). While uploading images, I realized that I have not updated my Google+ photos either, so I decided to do that as well. Then, somebody contacted me through my long forgotten Flickr account, asking a photography question. All this is happening while I am trying to simultaneously update my Twitter and Facebook accounts. And I won’t even go into talking about all the YouTube, Pinterest, Myspace, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon and LiveJournal requests and comments that keep pouring into my email address.

Social Media for Photography

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