THE BIG PRINT printing your photos - The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 - page 427

I wish Lightroom had the built-in ability to add custom borders, edges,
and frames around your photos, but unfortunately it just doesn't. However,
you can do a little workaround that lets you use your Identity Plate,
and a special option in the Identity Plate section, to get the same
effect right within Lightroom itself. Here's how it's done:

Adding Custom
Borders to
Your Prints

Step One:
Just like the slide show borders we did in
Chapter 12, we'll start in Photoshop with
the edge border you see here (from iStock-
photo.com; you can download it for free
from this book's website, mentioned in the
introduction). The edge comes flattened
on the background, so select the entire
black area. Then press Command-Shift-J
(PC: Ctrl-Shift-J) to put it up on its own
separate layer. Cut a rectangular hole out of
the center (so our photo can show through)
using the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) ,
then press the Delete (PC: Backspace) key.
Our file can't have a solid white back-
ground, though, or it will cover our photo
in Lightroom—instead it has to be trans-
parent. So, go to the Layers panel and
click-and-drag the Background layer into
the Trash (at the bottom of the panel).
Now, save the file in PNG format.

Step Two:
All right, that's all the prep work in Photo-
shop—back to Lightroom. Click on the
photo you want to have an edge frame,
then go to the Print module. In the Page
panel, turn on the Identity Plate checkbox.
Then, in the Identity Plate pop-up menu,
choose Edit to bring up the Identity Plate
Editor seen here. Click on the Use a Graph-
ical Identity Plate radio button (because
we're going to import a graphic, rather than
using text), then click on the Locate File
button, locate your saved PNG frame file,
and click Choose (PC: Open) to load it into
your Identity Plate Editor (you can see the
top of our edge frame in the small preview
window shown here).

Continued