Let’s face it, Adobe seriously dropped the ball on watermarking within Lightroom. Many of us got hints about potential new watermarking features for Lightroom 2.0 but were disappointed when there was nothing added. For many of us, Lightroom is the tool that we use for 90%+ of our workflow including prepping images for use on the web so the last thing we want to do is run some action in Photoshop or have to run an additional application to apply watermarks which reduces the image quality because the jpeg image has to be saved a second time. So is there a solution? The answer is yes, and best of all its extremely flexible.

The Solution
I wish I could say I found some magic way of doing advanced watermarking hidden away deep in the bowels of Lightroom that had so far gone undiscovered, however, this is unfortunately not the case. What we will need to do is install a post-process plug-in to do the work for us.

The plugin we will use is Timothy Armes’ LR2/Mogrify which uses ImageMajick to do things such as:

• Graphic watermarking
• Multiple text annotations
• Multiple borders
• Image resizing
• Adjust saturation and brightness
• Export against an ICC profile file

How much does this amazing plug-in cost? Well, it is free if you want to be limited to only exporting 10 images at a time. If you need to do more, than Timothy will accept any donation that you think is fair.

Installation
First off, we need to download LR2/Mogrify from Timothy Armes site at:
http://timothyarmes.com/lr2mogrify.php

Follow the installation instructions there for either Windows or Mac OSX. I won’t cover the installation since it is only a few simple steps.

Usage
Using LR2/Mogrify is as simple as using Lightroom’s existing Export function as the functions are added into the export utility. The easiest way to get things started is to create a new file in Photoshop with an empty (transparent) background and your logo on other layers. If you don’t have Photoshop, anything that can create a PNG or GIF with a transparent background will work.

From the Library module in Lightroom, select an image or images (up to 10 with the free version) and click on the Export button.

In the Post-Process actions enable the features you want like borders, or Graphical Watermark. In our case we will select the Graphic Watermark, select the file that we want to use, select the bottom left hand corner of the image, and resize the image if needed.

After you configure all the settings you want, click on the Export button to start the process. In a few seconds you have created your first watermarked images.

Here are a few images showing some different watermark styles as well as a multi-line border setup.

Who would have thought that doing advanced watermarking would be this easy? Please consider donating to Timothy for his hard work on bringing us a tool that provides the functionality that should have been included in Lightroom.

Below is a video showing exactly how this works:

Advanced watermarking with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom from Kerry Garrison on Vimeo.