Kelly Anne MartinPhotography

5th February 2009
Posted in Blog, Tutorials
Tagged in: lightroom, lightroomtips, tutorial

This episode of @lightroomtips – the blog version features a graphical tutorial about how to customize the interface of Lightroom. This is more of a fun tip than a useful one – but there’s nothing that says Lightroom needs to be all business! I’m using Lightroom 2 below – the process may be different (or limited) in Lightroom 1.

One of the nice things about Lightroom is that Adobe has built into the program the ability to customize the look of the workspace, right down to the logo that appears at the top.

Open up Lightroom and go to the file menu. Choose “Preferences”.

The last tab in preferences is “Interface”. Click on this tab, and explore the different options. My Lightroom changes as I make alterations, so you can preview what each option does. The default options is always marked, so don’t be afraid to play around!

These are all visual tweaks – the only one that I find useful to my editing process is the background. Here you can pick a texture and a default color – white, shades of grey, or black. I like to keep mine dark grey, so the default is fine. You can also add a texture, such as stripes.

One of the fun options is panel end mark. Lightroom has a few built-in options from which you can choose. See all of them below.

Or you can create your own – the program supports PNGs, so toss some transparency in there. I’ve created a panel end mark that is text which reads “Panel End Mark”. Choose “Go to Panel End Marks Folder” from the drop down box, and when you have decided on a file to use for your mark, simply drag it to that folder. You will need to close the preferences dialogue box and reopen it to get your custom mark to show.

Make your changes, and then close out the Preferences dialogue box. Now, go back to the File menu and choose “Identity Plate Setup”. Here you can choose what the top row of module buttons looks like, as well as the Identity plate (where it says “Lightroom” in the top left corner of the program).

If you can’t see the second set of options for the module buttons, click “Show Details” in the bottom left corner.

In the top left corner, make sure to pick “Enable Identity Plate”. In the drop down box immediately next to that, you can save your Identity Plate after you’ve fixed it to your liking, so you can have multiple ones to choose from in the future.

Again, play with the options as you wish here. I’ve chosen to use a graphical identity plate (again, use a PNG to get some transparency) – Lightroom tells you the default height (57px) and allows you to simply drag and drop into the box. Shiny.

Change the font and color of your module buttons next. Pick a font you want; you can pick from two different colors, the first one for the active module and the second for the inactive modules.

The final effect looks something like this -

And that’s how you can customize Lightroom. Enjoy, and see you next week for another blog!