Printing in a Folio format

[loonsailor]

I'm ready to print out my first folio.  I had hoped to print from LR, but it doesn't seem to have enough flexibility to manage the text.  For each image, I'd like to put my name in the lower left, the name of the folio in the lower right, and a caption for the specific image centered, a bit above the other two, and larger.  I can get my name right, with the identity plate, but I can't seem to get the other things done.  I can select "photo info" and show a caption, but I seem to have no control over the positioning, size, font, etc. of it.

Is the capability there to do what I want and I'm somehow missing it?  If not, how have people done folio printing.  I could import each print into PS, or import the lot into InDesign, if I can't do it from LR.

Thanks for any advice.

[Ronny Nilsen]

I use InDesign for my folios.

Ronny

[John R Smith]

Is the capability there to do what I want and I'm somehow missing it?  If not, how have people done folio printing.  I could import each print into PS, or import the lot into InDesign, if I can't do it from LR.

Thanks for any advice.

Sailor

This is part of Lightroom which drives me completely crazy. It is almost useful, but actually not quite there. Not only are you restricted to one text string and placement per image, there is no proper control over point size. So it pretty much impossible to have a series of different captions all with the same point height. And the window which you type the text into does not wrap so your caption disappears off to the right as you type.

Rather than soft-proofing or layers or other fancy enhancements, I really wish the LR team would put their creative energy into fixing simple stuff in the UI like this. Things like re-naming a file, which you would expect to be on a right-click along with delete, but isn't. And being able to delete a grad or a local adjustment brush on a right-click, too, rather than having to find the delete key.

John

[jacland]

Surely You can do it in InDesign, but...
Maybe Adobe wants us to pay for ID because of lack of more friendly text managing You mentioned and for PS because of lack of softproofing (mentioned by John).
Just kidding........ Maybe not quite.
BTW that reminds me about some strange invention: using four horse treadmill to strike a match.

Jacek

[Thomas Krüger]

Qimage would be another possiblity. But working with InDesign is a better option.

[tomrock]

Another option would be to use Mogrify to add the text, import the new images with the text and print from LR. ID is probably better.

[loonsailor]

It sounds pretty much unanimous.  I own InDesign as part of CS5, but so far I've successfully avoided learning to use it.  I guess this is my excuse to learn.

One last question, though maybe it'll be obvious when I start learning.  How do I get the images from LR to ID?  Do I export jpg's or tif's?  Use LR's publish feature (which I also haven't tried yet)?  Use Bridge (which I normally don't)?  Something else?  Can I keep them in ProPhoto RGB color space in ID?

[neile]

Loonsailor,

I usually export them as JPEGs and it works fine. Depending on how fancy you want to get you can create a template in InDesign and then export both the images and metadata from Lightroom and do a "mail merge" in InDesign to generate your folio pages. This is very handy if you have a standard folio layout you like to use.

I've got a blog entry up on how to do this at http://www.danecreekfolios.com/blog/2010/2/13/creating-blurb-pdfs-using-lightroom-and-indesign.html. While it's talking about using the merge facility to make a Blurb book, the exact same process can work to make folio pages.

Neil

[Thomas Krüger]

@Loonsailor - If you have all the software, here is the how-to as a video tutorial: http://www.lenswork.com/workshops/folios.html