I sell digital images on DVD to many of my portrait photography clients and all of my commercial photography clients. I always provide those images on a printable DVD [ Amazon: Taiyo Yuden/JVC WaterShield DVD's ] that I print directly to with my Epson Artisan printer [ Amazon: Epson Artisan 835 Color Inkjet All-In-One ]. I am incredibly happy with the results and they look very professional.

The problem is that the CD / DVD printing software that comes with Epson printers is hokey (at best), and I’ve never been able to figure out how to print directly to the DVD from within Adobe Photoshop. It always ended up off center, too big, too small, or even completely off the disc. I finally took the time to figure it out. Yay!

It turns out that the Epson printer driver requires that you use an A4 (US Letter) size print template that has the disc image positioned in just the right place. And to further complicate it Epson uses “Type 1″ and “Type 2″ disc trays that require very different placement of the template on the page. I created Photoshop templates for both Tray types and have provided them here for free for you to use.

Please use the following link to download a zip file that contains templates for Epson Type 1 and Epson Type 2 CD/DVD printer trays in TIF format. I don’t guarantee that they are perfect for all Epson printers, but they work great for me.

Download the Free Photoshop Template

• OD Epson CD/DVD Print Templates for Adobe Photoshop (Photoshop Template)

For reference here is a link to a file that contains a list of Epson Printers and indicates what tray type they use.

In general older printers are Type 1 and newer printers are Type 2.

My wife recently decided that she wanted to get a bunch of images of the kids printed. I wasn’t around and she didn’t know what the best way would be to make a list of those images for me to print. She had lo res copies of all of the images of the kids that I’ve put out for public display over the last year and so she decided to copy the ones she wanted printed into a new folder on my hard drive. I then had to find all of those images in Lightroom in order to prep print quality versions to send to the printer.

In this case there were only a few images so I could have manually searched for them all pretty quickly. But I didn’t do that. Instead I figured out the “right way” to do it so that I could very quickly repeat the process in the future…

There are two broad steps involved:

1. Create a text file with a listing of the directory contents. I use “Karen’s Directory Printer” for that.
2. Tag the images in Lightroom so that they can be sent to the printer. I use a Lightroom plugin from Timothy Armes called LR/Transporter for that.

Note – If you haven’t used any of Tim Armes’ plugins before, you owe it to yourself to check them out. They are all free for limited use, or by donation for the full feature list. You can find them at Photographers-Toolbox.com. My personal favorite is LR/Enfuse, which allows you to blend multiple images made with multiple exposures (somewhat like HDR photograpahy, only not quite).