cropping (with guides?)

[georgiemd]

I have been using Lightroom 4.4 for Mac for quite some time now.

I am shooting a heap of product photos for my website and I'm colour grading, cropping etc n Lightroom and exporting to CS5 for some final post work.

I need there to be uniformity in the size and placement of the products within the white background. I cannot find a way to place guides in Lightroom (like in photoshop). Is it at all possible?

thanks in advance for any help u could offer.

George

 

[clee01l]

Welcome to the forum.

Final size will be fixed on the Export from LR dialog, All of your work is maintained in LR including any work modified in PS via the edit in function. Export the final image for the web using the Resize parameter on the Export dialog.

 

[georgiemd]

thanks Cletus,

I understand exactly what you are saying but it is not about resizing. It's about cropping all photos in a uniform manner. I mean the products I have photographed need to be aligned in exactly the same manner from frame to frame. I need guides. From what I understand Lightroom 4(.4) does not support guides? Do I have to upgrade to 5??

 

[clee01l]

I guess I am not understanding what you mean by "guides". Lightroom offers several aspect ratios (1:1, 4:3, 4:5, 5:7 etc) You can even create custom aspect ratios. If you want all of your images to have a horizontal dimension of 1024 pixels and they are all cropped 4:3, then you choose this dimension on Export and all exported images will be exactly 1024X768 pixels. If by "guides" you mean a template in LR that is going to be 1024X768 pixels or something else, this is not the way LR is designed to work. You can tweak the crop window to get close and sometimes you can get lucky. You can save this image as a saved settings and paste that crop window onto all of the other images that you want to use that pixel crop.

 

[Hal P Anderson]

No, it isn't possible. In Photoshop, you can place a set of lines (guides) on the image that the crop tool will snap to, making it easy to crop in a standardized way. Lightroom won't do that for you.