Bleed margin in Export

When you export, you can designate a size and PPI - so for my example, lets say A4 size, 210mm width at 300PPI. The crop ratio of the paper size is 1.414.

I am printing some photos at full bleed, so I need an extra 5mm bleed beyond the 1.414 crop of the image. The crop ratio will be slightly different (1.395) due to the bleed, and I will lose some of the sides of images if I just export the original image. There is NO easy way to change the existing crop ratio and pick the exact number of pixels I need for the bleed - this is very painful to do (and involves doing quite a bit of fussing in Photoshop to preserve my exact crop in the printed area of the page).

I believe that this could be very easily implemented and solved as an Export option in Lightroom and would be an enormous benefit for anyone wanting to preserve their existing crop when printing full page.

In the Image Sizing option of the Export dialog have an additional field that allows you to specify a bleed amount which will be applied to ALL the sides of the image.

You can either default to White/Black as a fill colour when you do not have enough pixels outside of your crop on any one of the sides. You don’t need to add this as a “extend option”, as this is easily implemented in InDesign (for example) - but you do need something to specify if you do not have enough pixels on any given side.

You would expand from the center (extended by equal number of pixels on each side)

I think the UI could be quite simple, along the lines of:

x Add Bleed | nn | mm/in.       Fill Color (White/Black/Picker etc) - if needed...

So, for my example, I would export to an A4 size, add 5mm bleed, at 300ppi, and I get an exported image of 220x307mm (300 ppi) which includes the original crop + the 5mm extra bleed pixels, taken from outside of my crop.

Simple right! :-)

William