Tutorial: How To Boost Your Brand with Adobe Lightroom

For us as professional or amateur photographers, an important part of our daily work is to add a personal touch to the works we are creating. In part, that personal touch is how we label our completed work, and it is how we customize the interface of the software for a more comfortable experience.

Adobe Lightroom gives users the option of customizing the User Interface via what is known as Identity Plates, as well as using many other elements, such as Watermarks, to add a personal touch to our completed work. You can even sell presets that your audience have identified as being your ‘style’.

Through this guide, we are going to learn how to get the most out of Adobe Lightroom in order to enhance the reputation of our brand.

Lightroom’s Identity Plate

If you don’t know what I am talking about, the Identity Plate is the area where Lightroom displays the name of the application, and which can be fully customized by using elements of our Brand.

In order to edit this area so it matches the needs of our brand, we have to go to the Edit Menu and go to the Identity Plate Setup.

Here, Lightroom gives us several options for customizing the Identity Plate. For Lightroom 5 and later versions, the default Identity Plate is Lightroom Mobile.

Click where it says ‘Personalize’ to start customizing your Identity Plate.

As you can see, Lightroom now gives us several options for customizing the Identity Plate. The simplest way to do it is by writing a custom text with the Lr font already displayed, or you can load a logo image to match the Identity Plate, as in the example below.

The image size should be 46 pixels tall for PCs and 57 pixels tall for Macs. It is best to use a PNG file, rather than a JPEG.

Identity Plates are stored internally in the Lightroom Catalog and are not available in the regular catalogs. A good way to have constant access to the files, so you can reuse them, is by keeping the PNG graphics used to construct identity plates in a folder named ID Plates.

That way you will not lose data, you can reuse them if you want to build more catalogs, and they are available if by chance you have to do a full reinstall of your PC and need to create the Identity Plates again.

One feature Lightroom seems to lack is a proper way to adjust the position of the Identity Plate at the user UI. The current workflow only allows users to upload the file, and Lightroom will automatically position it. This means that if your logo happens to have some larger parts, these may “swallow” parts of the Navigator panel.

Note also, that labels for each Lightroom module can be edited by changing either the font or the color to match the font type used for your logo, or to create a harmonious composition using other fonts.

Watermarks for your images in Lightroom

Another way to enhance the distinctiveness of your brand is by using a custom watermark on every image you process with a logo you design. In order to achieve this effect in Lightroom, all you need to do is to access the Edit Watermark options located at the Edit Menu.

The Lightroom Watermark Editor will pop up, allowing you to work either with text or with a PNG logo file, as we did earlier for the Identity Plate.

Here, you can adjust the position using either the Inset sliders or the Anchor options while getting a tiny preview of the current location of your watermark. Click save to create a watermark template for use later on, when you export your processed images.

Panel End IDs

Finally, there is another fashionable way of boosting your brand identity with Lightroom, and this is by using the Panel End Marks.

This very quick process can be started by right-clicking at the panel end of any Lightroom module, then selecting the option for opening the Panel End Marks folder.

This will instantly open Lightroom’s root install folder, where you have to enter the ‘Panel End Marks’ folder. Paste the logo file you want to use at the Panel End, and restart Lightroom in order to reload the Panel End option images, then right-click to prompt the Panel End menu. Here, select the image you loaded to the folder and Panel End will update it to match your logo.

The size of your Panel End Mark is determined by the maximum panel width in Lightroom. On HD displays you can use graphics with no more than 360-380 pixels, whereas 4K monitors can hold images up to 700 pixels wide. As always, use PNG files for a neat Panel End look.

As you can see, there are several ways of adapting Lightroom to suit your brand. Further adjustments are possible at the Book, Slideshow, and Web modules for each kind of output Lightroom supports.

The print module will not require as much attention, given the fact you already created a Watermark in the other modules, meaning that you merely need to activate the option for watermarks in order to make it work.

Good luck and keep editing!

About the Author!

Jane manages Sleeklens.com which specializes in Lightroom workflows and Photoshop. You can connect with them on their Facebook, Twitter or Youtube. When she is not busy managing Sleeklens, you can find her traveling around the world or enjoying long walks in nature.