I’m three posts behind again. It’s already Friday, I’m on the train to Carinthia, this is the image for Wednesday, and the topic is still Lightroom.
This is the first image that I’ve completely made in Lightroom. No Photoshop involved. I have cropped to a square, added two gradients at the top, one that warms up the bluish horizon and increases its contrast, and another one that cools the sky back to normal. Other than that I had no need for any manipulations, with one exception, of course I wanted to add my border.
From looking around in Lightroom I got the impression that making borders is not a built-in feature, but I strongly suspected that there would be a plugin for that. Google found me LR/Mogrify 2, a wrapper around ImageMagick’s “mogrify” command.
LR/Mogrify 2 is an export filter. Basically you choose “Export / Export …” from the image’s context menu, and then you insert “Outer border” into the export pipeline. This gives you the option to add up to five borders to the image. I use three, a black inner border with four pixels (useful if the image has bright content near the border), a white border with 120 pixels (maybe less for smaller sizes) and finally a two pixel black outer border, because when you read my blog in Google Reader, the images are displayed on white background.
LR/Mogrify 2 is “donation ware”. Donate any (?) amount via Paypal, and you get a licence code. I’ve donated 10 GBP because this plugin perfectly solves a problem and I’m definitely going to use it.
The Song of the Day is “Border Song” from Aretha Franklin’s extremely recommendable 1972 album “Young, Gifted and Black”. Hear it on YouTube.