Hi Folks:

 Update: If you’re looking for 2014 calendars, please click here.

Fixed the link – December 4, 2012 – my apologies!

While there are usually several templates made every year to make photo calendars in Lightroom, (with many thanks to their respective providers, you can find one here, one here, one here, one here, a Photoshop script here, and while not a template, Matt Kloskowski has a video on using downloaded calendar images in Lightroom here (corrected the link, December 20).  NB: He begins in Photoshop, but you can do most of what he does straight in Lightroom.  I’ll add more links as I come across them)  last year I created a template in MS Word that allowed people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars.  Thought I’d do the same again this year.  I used MS Word 2007 to make the template, but saved it as both a Word 2007 file and a Word 97-2003 compatible file.  Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:

The large square at the top is a blank picture file.  If you click on it and go to Insert/Picture, you can replace the existing (blank) picture with one of your own.  The easiest way is to select 12 images that all have the same size/shape; otherwise you may have to fiddle with the cell heights to make the calendar line up from month to month.  Where it says ‘Caption’, you can highlight and type in your own caption for each image, or you can simply highlight and delete the text if you don’t want a caption.  Here are the template files:

2012 Calendar template – Word 2007
2012 Calendar template – Word 97-2003

Last year I also made my own photo calendar available, and some people seemed to appreciate that so I did it again this year.  It looks like this:

As before, all of the images were made on Vancouver Island.  The image for March was made at Botany Bay in Juan de Fuca Provincial Park, and the others were all made in the Victoria area; all were made in the month they represent (i.e. the image for January 2012 was made in January 2011, etc.)  I saved it as a .pdf file, then zipped it to save a little space.  Clicking on the picture will enable you to download the zip file.

BTW, all of the images in the calendar are covered by a Creative Commons license, non-commercial, non-dervis.  That means you can use them for personal use but not for business, you can’t modify or change them in any way, and if you do use them you’ll give me credit for them by adding my name and linking back to this site or our Flickr site.  Thanks!!

Our best wishes to you and those close to you for a new year full of as much love, excitement, joy, peace and harmony as you can handle!

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. Ed Weaver kindly provided one of the Lightroom template sets linked above.  He also passed along this advice:

“By the way. I do them in gray scale so I can color them in LR.

If you go to Split Toning in the develop module, you can set the balance to -100, (more shadow). Turn up the saturation slider up to 100, (max color in shadows), using the shadow hue slider you can change the color of the grays. Play with the hue and saturation and balance sliders until you get what you like. To match your pictures.”

P.S. II, the sequel You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.