Happy Mother's Day!

Ok, I'm a bit late, even for my overseas friends!
But I hope you had a good one, anyway.
As my girls have grown and started leaving home Mother's Day has become so much more special. I just love seeing them all together and having fun. We had a lovely lunch at a local restaurant. Not only was the food fabulous, but they had a wall that provided the perfect backdrop and a big window for light! How thoughtful of them!
So here is my family and an extra one (extra-TALL one) who is quickly becoming a special member of the family.

And then they were gone!!

Hope your day was wonderful as mine!

Creating a Photobook from Lightroom

I've gradually been using Lightroom more and more in my workflow after being thoroughly convinced by Jared Platt's The Ultimate Lightroom Workflow class at CreativeLive. I even bought LRv4 just so I could create photobooks. (You can download Lightroom 5 Beta for free).

My first book arrived this week:

The cover was obviously not created in Lightroom. Credits here.

Lightroom only creates Blurb books so the photobooks can only be in Blurb sizes. You might notice that this book is in A4 landscape size- my preferred size. This is NOT a Blurb book. The closest Blurb has is 10"x8" or 12"x12".

So I thought I'd share how I made a non-Blurb book from Lightroom.
I pretended I was making a 12"x12" Blurb book and chose a bunch of templates that allowed a big margin at the top and the bottom. In Lightroom my pages looked like this:



Just to be sure, I made an image to use in the background that showed how much margin I needed.

That way I could easily check what was going to be chopped off my page.

Then from Lightroom I exported my book as JPG, and used the autoflow function in my photobook software (Albumworks) to automatically make full bleed pages. The excess margins were ignored.

It was so nice to be able to work within Lightroom switching between the Develop module to edit images and the Book module to work on the page. The export to JPG and import into my Albumworks photobook software at the end was a bit of a pain (I wish Blurb had A4 as an option!) but I'll certainly do it this way again.

Here are some more pages from my book:

If you're interested in giving Lightroom's Book module a try I recommend watching some of Julieanne Kost's free tutorials. She explains it very simply.

At first the set of templates in Lightroom seems a bit limited, but you can play around with the padding of cells and captions to easily customise them. I was even able to turn a photo cell into a journaling box by placing a white photo in the cell and adjusting the offset of the caption so it started at the top.

It was all quite straight forward, and I had a photobook done in record time! Great fun! :)