For many years I’ve used a black background for my Lightroom slideshow, and I still will sometimes, but recently, as I held a freshly printed photograph on Breathing Color’s Optica One fine art paper, I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could emulate a matted fine art print in my Lightroom slideshows!?

A few minutes later I had the background colors, image stroke borders and drop shadows set up in a way that looks to me very much like the window cut out of a matte, and the photograph mounted under it. Of course, there’s no frame around the matte, but when I start this slideshow full-screen, the black border around my monitor becomes the frame of the print, which looks quite effective.

Anyway, I figured I’d share the slideshow, in case you want to give this a try. Just DOWNLOAD it, unzip it, and drop it into your Templates folder, and give it a whirl!

Notes:

* I set it up so that my logo is shown on the intro splash screen, so you might need to select a logo of your own, or uncheck the “Intro Screen” section under “Titles”.

* If you don’t know where your Slideshow Templates are stored, right click a slideshow of your own and select “Show in Finder/Explorer” and your folder will appear. Just drop this template in there and restart Lightroom.

* If you add Titles to your images under Metadata in the Library module, they will be displayed under the image in the slideshow.

* I created this with Lightroom 4, so it might not work with earlier versions.

Of course, if you don’t know me, you might be concerned that this is a virus, so by all means run a virus scan against the file before you open it. I packaged it myself though, and know that it’s clean and it sits on my Libsyn server, so no one can mess with it.

Here are a few screen shots of some of my slides, really just to provide a bit of eye-candy for the blog post, but you can click the first image, then navigate back and forth with your mouse or keyboard arrow keys, to get an idea of what the slideshow looks like.

Enjoy!