A few photographers have asked me how I put borders around my images so I thought I'd share my techniques and tools used. One technique that has gotten a lot of coverage is to use Lightroom's Print Module with overlays. I found this to be a clumsy method, especially for varying aspect ratios and it does not work well when exporting images for the web.

After a lot of research, I settled on a method using Lightroom's export function coupled with the LR/Mogrify plugin.

In a little more detail, it's like this:

The Tools

• Adobe Lightroom (sorry, I won't call it Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, that's just silly)
• LR/Mogrify
• ImageMagick (ImageMagick includes the mogrify script which does all the work)

The Setup

I won't go into detail of installing each of the components. That's covered by many people who know more about it than I do. But I will talk about the configuration of the tools.

Once you've installed the LR/Mogrify plugin, the Lightroom export dialog offers a choice of Export Actions.

LR/Mogrify makes many options for image manipulation available, but the ones we're interested in here are Borders and Watermarks.

Border Settings

I have a different setting (stored in a preset) for each different size I want to export to. So I have one for flickr, one for my blog website, one for 30 inch prints and so on.

I usually find a border width of about 3.5% of the longest side length works well, but that's just for the kind of borders I have gone for.

Logo Settings

As with borders, I create a different sized logo for each export size. The size of the logo is arrived at by some calculations based on the pixel height and dpi but a certain amount of trial and error is required to get it just right.

Once you have your images set up. just use the LR/Mogrify Watermarks and Annotations settings to specify your logo placement.

Conclusion

Setting the whole thing up is a little bit of work, but once it's in place, you can export a bunch of images for your chosen target medium with the borders automatically being added. It's a real time saver.

Be sure to tinker with the Mogrify file quality settings to ensure your file size is acceptable for your target medium. If you're not careful, a 3MB export can blow out to 6MB just with the addition of the border. However, of you get the right settings, adding a border does not nesseccarily add a lot to the image size.

Of course the LR/Mogrify plugin can be used for many other uses so be sure to check out all it has to offer.

Here's an example of the end result: