Advanced Watermarking with Lightroom
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.
25 Comments »
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[...] Camera Dojo gives us a great tute on advanced watermarking in Lightroom. [...]
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[...] Picking up where Adobe dropped the ball, here’s a great tute on advanced watermarking in Lightroom 2.0. [...]
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[...] it watermark, but it adds borders, multiple text annotations, etc. etc. I found out about through Camera Dojo. What it does is it adds the watermark, annotations, etc during the export. The downside [...]
Tks very much, very usefull, you solve me a big problem I had.
Tks again.
Tks very much, very usefull, you solve me a big problem I had.
Tks again.
I've been looking for a good flexible watermark option. It seems you have the solution. Great post.
I've been looking for a good flexible watermark option. It seems you have the solution. Great post.
Been waiting for this for what – years? installing now!
Been waiting for this for what – years? installing now!
Thank you! This is just what I needed!
Thank you! This is just what I needed!
We've been using Mogrify for a while now, and we just stopped. We'd been using it to export files and put our copyright info on them before printing. But we noticed that sometimes the plugin introduced some serious image degradation in very detailed areas in certain color range: mostly in blonde hair. It was pretty bad, and was causing us to reprint a lot. And for some reason, Mogrify just refused to work on certain files. There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. Just a caution; test before you use it in your normal workflow.
Thanks for the tip. My main concern is processing of images for use on the web and making sure you have a good watermark on anything that goes online. If I need to do some printing I will be sure and check it before sending it off. Thanks.
We've been using Mogrify for a while now, and we just stopped. We'd been using it to export files and put our copyright info on them before printing. But we noticed that sometimes the plugin introduced some serious image degradation in very detailed areas in certain color range: mostly in blonde hair. It was pretty bad, and was causing us to reprint a lot. And for some reason, Mogrify just refused to work on certain files. There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. Just a caution; test before you use it in your normal workflow.
Thanks for the tip. My main concern is processing of images for use on the web and making sure you have a good watermark on anything that goes online. If I need to do some printing I will be sure and check it before sending it off. Thanks.
I love this plugin. Once I figured out placement and size on my images it has worked flawlessly. I donated to him…well worth it.
awesome! Will save a TON of time. The version I DL'ed looks different that the screenshots you show, maybe you are Mac? As a heads-up, I could not get a .gif logo to work on my Windows machine, but a .PSD works GREAT. The .png file won't re-size while keeping aspect ratio (error box pops up).
Since I often output to different sizes, I set up everything as % of width… the ONLY negative is that my borders are a little bit narrower on portrait-oriented photos vs. landscape (obviously, it's % of width and width changes).
Overall, GREAT plugin, and I will be donating a nice amount to him very soon!
thanks again cool plug-in
Pls, I want to watermark the date, but without the time in mogrify on lr. The OrginalDateTime token works but puts the date and time and i dont want the time. Have you a solution for this?
Tks!
Sorry but I have never tried that. You might want to contact the LR/Mogrify author as a request.
Tks a lot. Do you can help-me on how contact him?
http://timothyarmes.com/
I've been looking for a way to add a watermark to multiple images when exporting, so this looks great! However, I'd love to be able to do this to images that I'm exporting directly to Facebook or Zenfolio (these plug-in apps I already use that I'm referencing for LR are by Jeffrey Freidel). Any way to combine these into one step? I really prefer not to do the first step of exporting all the images to my hard drive, then have to upload them to FB or Zenfolio, then go back and delete all of the exported images. Thanks so much for your help/advice!
Thanks lot, veru usefull,
Hey AMIGO
Thank you again
Hey AMIGO
Thank you again
Thanks for the info. i will be giving this plug-in a try.
I think that this would be fabulous if I could get it to work!! I did the install for both the mogrify and imagemagik and then what?? please help