Drop shadows in LR3?

[JohnN]

Hi all,

I'm looking to add a simple drop shadow around my image for export to flickr, something I thought would be simple, but oddly I cannot find it.

I know LR/Mogrify 2 can do all sorts as I use it, however it seems to be missing from that too.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

John

 

[OlyPaul]

Hi John, as far as I know this is not possible because a drop shadow requires the use of a layer and LR does not support layers.

 

[JohnN]

Thanks Paul, I was thinking that too - funny they thought to add it to text for watermarking, but not for the image as a whole.

However, going further down the mogrify route I contacted the author (who is a great guy by the way) to see if it possible to utilise the -shadow command from imagemagick in the end command line parameters and will keep you all posted.

I did just try that but got a blank white image.

In case you're wondering about the general effect its something like this (but without the rounded corners)

 

[JohnN]

Okay, I got it cracked.

I got a reply from the author (very quickly initially) and he said he didn't think it could be done, he is right but that is because to make a drop shadow you need to use the +clone option which is only available in the convert command of ImageMagick, but sadly not in mogrify (I'm not sure why he used mogrify over convert as I think its just a cut down version but otherwise appears the same)

Anyway the way I got it working is via another plugin which has broader scope if you;re willing to do a little work yourself, and the great thing is as a plugin it works with LR/Mogrify as well.

The plugin is "Jeffrey’s “Run Any Command” Lightroom Export Plugin" and is very simple, just slap a command in and it will run it.

Here is the command I used:

"C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-6.6.9-Q16\convert.exe" "{FILE}" -bordercolor Black -border 1×1 -bordercolor White -border 1%×1% ( +clone -background black -shadow 60x5+10+10 ) +swap -background white -layers merge +repage "{FILE}"

Simply broken down it runs convert from ImageMagick passes the {FILE} (that is the full file and its location - lightroom makes a temp file for upload), adds a thin black border, adds a percent based white one, clones the image and makes it a drop shadow, swaps the images so that the original is on top and merges then back together.

Well that the way I think it works!

One thats done I applied a 4% white border and text using the LR/Mogrify plugin.

All in all you get something like this:


IMG_3617.jpg by magsnorton, on Flickr