LR5 (and LR4) and blurb - customizing pages?

[stevepane]

Dear all,

I am pretty new to LR but have a long history in digital photography and publishing.
I was hoping that in LR5 there is really a possibility to create an own layout for pages.
But all the picture boxes are fixed. I would prefer if I could delete, add or resize these boxes to really createn an own layout.
Any ideas how to achieve this? Or is it really impossible?
Btw: For pages wiht more than 4 pictures there are tons of formats with quadratic picture boxes. Why? Where do all these quadratic boxes come from?
Art, hype, creative? All of a sudden tons of middle format photographers? But this is probably due to blurb....
What I would need e.g. is a simple 4 rows 2 colums format per page, rectangular boxes (about 3:2) in a portrait book format.

I really love the idea to create books in Lightroom and have the pictures as collections, starting from RAW-format - but the existing layout options are pretty limiting....
When using blurbs software you first have to create jpgs, save them in a folder and use them from there - the support of LR is gone...

Any ideas how to solve this?

Best regards

Stefan

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi Stefan, welcome to the forum!

It's close to impossible, sorry. But if you can find a layout that's vaguely similar, you can use the Cell Padding sliders to change the shape and position of those existing cells. Have a play with it and see how you get on. New to LR5 is the possibility to then save those 'custom pages' as templates, so you can reuse them on other pages. It's not exactly the custom pages people have been asking for, but it works fairly well.

 

[stevepane]

Dear Victoria,

thanks for the fast and clear answer. So I will stay with my existing book setup...
Maybe there is a decent solution in LR 6.

Many thanks and best regards

Stefan

 

[forgingahead]

I haven't tried it myself, but one workaround I read about someplace was to use the Print Module to create the layout you want, then print to a JPEGl and bring that into LR. Then you can select one of the full bleed page layouts and simply drop your print formatted image into the book. Kind of clunky and involves many steps, and can't be used as a simple page layup, but I don't see any reason this wouldn't work.

Bob

 

[pknight]

Bob,

Julianne Kost talks about doing this in one of the videos that accompanied the release of LR 4. These videos are at tv.adobe.com

 

[Victoria Bampton]

I've been chatting with a guy called Fabrizio, who's found a way of designing new templates. I can't make any promises, but you may find suitable templates on his site - or he may even be able to make custom ones for you. http://www.fabriziodenna.it/labs-en.htm

 

[pknight]

I wish there were some instructions on how these templates were created. Do these templates work in LR5?

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Yeah, they do, I double checked. He's backwards engineered everything.