Identity Plate in Print Module

[John R Smith]

Well, maybe I'm just missing something. Despite checking all the help files, and going through my Martin Evening book, I'm still stuck with this problem.

When I print my album 10x8 prints from LR, I like to use the Identity Plate as an overlay on the lower left-hand margin to make a caption for the picture. Something along the lines of "St Ervan Tower Door, April 2010" or whatever. This works fine on an individual basis, but is hopeless for a series of prints because I can't accurately control the size of the text. For a given font and point size, the size of the text alters on the print simply according to how many words are in the caption. So for fewer words, you get larger text, for more words, smaller text. The only way of changing this is to alter the size of the containing "box" or to alter the scale slider, but this is not accurate enough to get a series of six prints all to the same font size, precisely. I want a whole series of captions, each with a different number of words, to be exactly the same point size on each print. Just the same as it would be very easy to do in MS Word.

Has anyone got any ideas?

John

[BobFisher]

I have a similar problem.  I'm trying to put together a catalogue of images for a gallery and would like to have information on image title, printing options, etc.  

Rather than the Identity Plate, what about using the Photo Info.  You can select which fields to be included.  If you have a title and caption in the metadata, those can be included as a custom template.  You can also add a Custom Text field.  There are 4 or 5 font sizes to choose from.  I think you're limited to its location and can't move it around.  You can sort of format it by using spaces between fields.  If you want something on a separate line, I think you have to insert enough spaces to put it on the next line.  It's a bit of a kludge but it might work for what you're trying to do.  It doesn't seem that it's overly easy to do in LR.  What you could do is use the Identity Plate for the title then other information in the Photo Info box.

It'd end up looking something like this.  Wouldn't have the borders.  This is a screen grab from the LR print module



Not perhaps ideal but it works.

[John R Smith]

Thanks for taking the time to think about it and replying, Bob. Yes, I get the drift of your idea. I will experiment a bit more. But this should really be a lot easier to set up to do a professional job with, rather than giving the user half the tools they need and leaving the rest undone.

So much of Lightroom is like this - almost brilliant. An example is the line you can put around an image (I call it a box rule). I like to use this where the image is so high key that it needs a constraining border. But what you can't do is set the line out from the edge of the image by say 1/10 or 1/8 inch, which to my mind looks so much nicer.

John

[BobFisher]

Don't disagree, John.  There are some things like this that could be upgraded, no question.

[NikoJorj]

Another word of caution about the Identity Plate : with LR2, the ID Plate didn't get the same color management as the rest of the image (I'd guess it received none but can't say for sure).
Didn't have time yet to see if it's still the case with LR3.

Yes, a decent text tool (choice of font, position, etc...) would be soooo nice in the print module!