High Contrast Sketch Effect

[jrthe1 Profile]

I like this effect but since it has a border I am having difficulty printing in LR 5.x. I print on 13x19 paper and mat with a 12.5x18.5 internal dimension and would like the border to be 1/2" on all sides. Do I crop before or after the effect? I see the padding slider and see what it does and if this is the solution, what value should I use? Or?

[admin]

Hi jrthe1,

It's entirely up to you. The padding slider is part of the control you have over the effect, and you can use it to add extra space around the image. However, Lightroom will give you precise control over the printing process, so if you have something specific in mind, I'd use Lightroom to fine tune the border and not add any extra border in SPE.

Tony

[jrthe1 Profile]

Hey Tony, thanks for the response.

When I go to the print module in LR, the borders that the gallery effect produced are partly outside of the printable area for the parameters I stated above.

If you could use the high contrast sketch effect yourself and then go to print in LR using my parameters above, you will see what I mean.

How do I fix this? Please advise.

Thanks.

[eadams Profile]

Hello jrthe1,

Thank you for drawing my attention to this beautiful effect. It is a very complex effect and I like how many of the interim stages (as well as the final stage) look on my images.

Regarding your question, I don't understand the description of your parameters. As Tony points out, in the LR print module you can stretch or shrink your image to make the padding any width you want. Why is this not an option for you?

Within SPE itself, I assume the padding width is in pixels (there is no mention of the unit measure in the node). I should think that any tweaking you want to do there to result in a particular width in inches would depend on the resolution you are printing at, wouldn't it?

If you don't really need the border, another option would be to delete the border node.

[jrthe1 Profile]

Eadams- Thanks, but how do you delete the border node? Also, did you try printing in LR with one of you images given the printing parameters that I stated in my first query to see the results?

Please advise.

[eadams Profile]

Hi again jrthe1,

You can easily edit any existing effect after you have applied it. Simply right-click on the thumbnail of the effect at the top right of your screen and select Manual edit in the menu that appears.

Manual edit.JPG (23.06 KiB) Viewed 7659 times

The Effect Editor will open and you can see how the effect was put together.

To delete the border in this effect, scroll through the Effect Editor until you find the Border node.

Find border.JPG (101.8 KiB) Viewed 7659 times

Click on the Border node to select it and delete it by pressing the delete key on your keyboard.

Then connect the remaining nodes as follows:

High Contrast image without border node.JPG (105.05 KiB) Viewed 7659 times

To connect two nodes, click on the little connector on the right hand side of the first node and drag an arrow to the connector on the left hand side of the second node. There are video tutorials in the How to section of the forums that explain how to use and connect the nodes.

I couldn't try printing with your parameters because I didn't understand them except for the paper size (13x9 inches). I don't have that paper size, don't know the size of your image or what resolution you are printing at

[admin]

There are some good tutorials for how to print in Lightroom. For example http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-lightro ... -per-page/. Google will find many more. It sounds like if the picture is outside the printable area for the settings you have, you're going to have to change the settings by printing smaller in Lightroom.

It sounds like your main problem might be that the aspect ratio of the photo is different from that of your paper, which means you can't have the same size border all the way round unless you crop the photo before hand. If that is the case, trying to judge how much to crop your photo before applying a border effect such that the final aspect ratio is what you want, could be tricky. You could try judging it by eye, or I'd recommend just having narrower or wider borders on the top and bottom, compared to left and right.

Tony

[jrthe1 Profile]

Thanks Eadams and Tony. I have been printing in LR for some time so I think I know it rather well. The tricky part was the border that the effect included that a liked and did not want to remove. I cropped in LR first and applied the effect but had to eyeball and guess the padding amount to end up with the desired inside mat dimensions that I wanted. I then discovered a pixel to inch converter with google and now can dial in the border to match my printing parameters. For instance 1/2"= 48 pixels. So I guess I am all set.

Thanks again.