Tutorial: Adobe Lightroom CC

Adding Overlays

Next we’ll look at overlays. To add your logo as an overlay, you can choose an Identity Plate (Figure 6, below). For this project, I’ve selected the image shown in Figure 6. This is part of our new logo for Braintrust that we are working on.

Figure 6. Choosing an Identity Plate.

You can also change it to your default Identity Plate that you’ve already set up in Lightroom.

To add an image, choose Edit (as shown in Figure 6), and the Identity Plate Editor dialog box opens (Figure 7, below). If you currently have a styled text Identity Plate selected, as in Figure 7, select “Use a graphic identity plate,” and then click Locate File to locate the file either by browsing to its folder, or by simply dragging the image onto the space in Figure 7.

Figure 7. The Identity Plate Editor dialog box.

Click OK, and the image appears in the box where your styled text was. You can then adjust the Opacity and Scale, as shown in Figure 8 (below). 100% Scale will, of course, take up the entire image, but that will look more like a watermark, which is not necessary. For this project, I’ll scale it down to 10% so we’ll have a nice little bug in the corner (Figure 9, below Figure 8), which will be just enough remind people who did this.

Figure 8. Adjusting Opacity and Scale.

Figure 9. Our Identity Plate at 10% as a bug in the corner.

Also in the right-hand column, you can also turn on watermarking (Figure 10, below), or select the “Render behind image” checkbox in Figure 8 to have the image show up behind your photos. That’s kind of pointless in this case because that means viewers will not see it at all. You can also add Rating Stars by selecting the checkbox just below Watermarking in Figure 10. When you select this checkbox, if you or one of your clients has already rated your images at 4 stars, 5 stars, 1 star, and so on, those ratings will show on the screen while the slideshow runs. For this project, we want something that people can just share on Facebook, on YouTube, or email to their family. So we don’t need to show stars or what people think about them. We just want to show the images.

Figure 10. Other overlay and backdrop options.

Text Overlays (below Rating Stars in Figure 10) will allow you to add a caption over each image, describing it.

Choosing Backdrop Options

Color Wash, below Text Overlays in Figure 10, is this gray you see behind the image in Figure 5. It is basically a gradient. If I turn Color Wash off, it just goes to solid black. But turning it on gives you this gradient. You can, of course, adjust the colors to nearly any value by using your dropper and the slider, as shown in Figure 11 (below). But, I like the neutral background you can see in Figure 11. And it also has a little bit of a gradient to add some interest. It’s not just a solid color. And then you can also add another background color on top of it (below Background Image in Figure 10).

Figure 11. Adjusting the Color Wash.

You can also add a Background Image (below Text Overlays in Figure 10). You should be careful doing this because, depending on the image, it could clutter up the entire composition. So, you’d want something pretty neutral. You would definitely want to adjust the opacity so it does not take all the attention away from the prominent images that are going to be in front of it.

Adding Titles

You can also add an Intro Screen (top of Figure 12, below). You can use an image like the early-morning opener image I’ve chosen for this project, or you can use your default identity plate in Lightroom, just as you could when you were adding overlays. You can also add an ending screen or an outro (Figure 11). You can then adjust the background color again to basically any color that you wish.

Figure 12. Choose title, intro, and outro options here.