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Cropping Your Photos In-Camera and in Post-Production: A Guide

25 Dec

The post Cropping Your Photos In-Camera and in Post-Production: A Guide appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Kevin Landwer-Johan.

Cropping your photos either in-camera or during post-production helps to create more interesting compositions. Capturing a strong composition as you take a photo is always satisfying, but can be difficult.

Learning to compose well takes time and practice. However, you can often create better compositions by carefully cropping your photos as you are editing them.

woman out standing in a field for cropping photos — © Kevin Landwer-Johan

What is cropping?

Cropping is cutting or trimming parts of your photo. This is most often done to improve the composition or to alter the aspect ratio.

In the past, cropping involved a straight edge and a blade. These days, cropping happens on the computer and is much less aggressive; you can always hit “Undo” and try again if you make a mistake.

Cropping in-camera is a common term that’s not particularly correct. Cropping means a part of a photo is cut off. This alters the aspect ratio. You cannot do this when you are composing your images; you can only do this after you’ve taken them.

In other words:

You can compose your photos to include or exclude whatever you like, but this is not really cropping.

Some purists believe cropping your photos is wrong. They maintain that the image you capture should not be altered by cutting part of it out.

Other photographers are quite happy to leave excessive space around their main subject and crop to compose a better image as they are post-processing.

I say, “Each to their own.” My preference is to compose well, then crop well when editing if I need to.

But only if I need to.

Cropping photos always reduces the number of pixels in an image. Cutting off a lot of a photo can affect its clarity and the ability to enlarge it (compared to an image that remains full and uncropped).

studio photo of a woman — © Kevin Landwer-Johan

When is it best to crop a photo?

Beginner photographers can benefit from cropping photos for two main reasons:

First, cropping your photos well can improve a poor composition. You can rescue a photo by reducing the amount of empty space or taking out distracting elements. When you have not taken the time to compose well, or are not yet sure how to create a good composition, cropping can help draw attention to your main subject.

Second, learning to crop well will help you better understand strong composition. It’s often easier to see how to improve a photo by cropping when you are sitting at your computer than when you’re trying to remember how to set an accurate exposure in the field.

As you sit and look at a photo you’re editing, think about how it can be improved by trimming off the top or bottom. Or maybe by bringing the left or right edges closer to your main subject.

farm landscape cropping your photos — © Kevin Landwer-Johan

When there’s no time pressure, you can experiment with how you want your compositions to look. You can make copies of a photo and try different crops to see which one you like best.

The main rule of composition I follow is to fill the frame. If I find that I have not done this well enough when I am taking a photo, it is my first consideration when I start to crop.

Maybe there’s something in the photo I had not noticed when I was taking it. Someone may have stepped into the edge of the frame as I pressed the shutter release. Sometimes, I’ll trim an edge so my main subject lines up with one of the rule of thirds gridlines, or sits at the intersection of these lines.

studio portrait of a man for cropping your photos — © Kevin Landwer-Johan

How do you know what to crop?

Will your photo look better if you crop it? That is the most important question to answer before trimming a photo. If you think your image will look better, go ahead and crop. But be purposeful about what you do.

Consider the lines in your photo. Often, lines in a composition will be affected if you crop. Part of the digital cropping process can include rotating your image. This allows you to straighten a crooked horizon or get vertical lines in your photo looking natural.

Think about the rule of thirds. Will cropping help your photo conform to this compositional standard? It can be much easier to apply this rule during post-processing than when you are taking a photo. You can often be much more precise when editing, depending on what your subject is.

Look for distracting elements. Does everything fill the frame and support the main subject of your photograph? If not, think about how you could crop these elements out. Sometimes, it might be power lines at the top of your photo. Or a power pole or a person at one edge.

Square framing will transform the composition into something completely different. For some subjects, this will be perfect. Not many of us use square format cameras, so to achieve this look we must crop during the editing process.

Think about cropping as you compose. Sometimes, you’ll see that a square will frame your subject better than a rectangle. Or that a wide, panoramic style will suit your subject better. I’ll often think about how I will crop an image as I am taking it if my subject does not fit the 3:2 ratio of my camera’s sensor.

white teapot square cropping photo — © Kevin Landwer-Johan

How do you crop your photo to fit a specific aspect ratio?

Sometimes, you may need to fit a photo to a specific aspect ratio, such as when you want to update your Facebook or website banner image.

Here’s how I do that:

First, I’ll do a quick search to find the current size requirements of the place I want to use the image.

Then I’ll make a new blank canvas in Photoshop or Affinity Photo, one that matches the aspect ratio I need.

Next, I’ll drag and drop the photo I want to use onto that blank canvas.

Then I’ll resize the image and position it to appear the way I want it to look.

When changing the aspect ratio of a photo, you need to consider how it will look and what you’ll be cropping out. Often, banner images are wider than a 3:2 camera-sensor ratio, so the top and/or bottom of the image will be sacrificed. Profile photos often need to fit a square format.

Placing your photo in a blank frame that fits the correct aspect ratio allows you to move it around within the space to see how it best fits, or if it doesn’t.

close-up of a woman with a chocolate ice cream — © Kevin Landwer-Johan

Cropping your photos: Conclusion

Cropping your photos can help you learn to create better compositions. When taking your time to ponder an image on your computer monitor, you can often see how you could have framed the shot better.

Aim to fill your frame. Experiment with copies of your photos. Crop each copy differently to see which composition you like best.

And by repeating this process with every image you edit, you’ll soon find that you’re cropping fewer of your photos.

The post Cropping Your Photos In-Camera and in Post-Production: A Guide appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Kevin Landwer-Johan.

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Content-aware cropping coming soon to Adobe Photoshop CC

27 May

Adobe Photoshop CC will soon offer content-aware cropping, the company has announced. The feature, as demonstrated in a video released today, will allow Photoshop users to automatically fill any white space around an adjusted photo with content that matches the original image. The tool can be used to add content (to change the aspect ratio, for example), or to fill in gaps that result from rotating or repositioning the image.

Content-aware cropping has been a frequently requested feature, says Adobe. The company will include the new cropping tool ‘as part of an upcoming major release,’ though it doesn’t specify whether it will be the next major update or a later one.

Via: Adobe

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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How Cropping in Post-Production Can Improve Composition

16 Nov

Even though I strive to get the best compositional shot in-camera. I do see ‘cropping’ as essential to my post editing workflow. For such a simple post edit technique, it can really enhance and improve composition of the image. I have also found cropping an image, be it small or in a creative sense can transform an image dramatically.

How Cropping in Post-Production

I like to view cropping as reframing the scene. The initial framing of the scene comes when you look through the viewfinder, then next when you have uploaded your images onto your computer for editing.

You get the chance and time to critically see if your image(s) needs cropping and what type is required. For example, there might be some distracting elements in the foreground that you missed when you looked through the viewfinder, or a horizon line isn’t quite as straight as it should be.

In this article, I’m going to illustrate the following reasons why you might crop your images in post-production:

To straighten lines: keep the horizons even and the vertical lines vertical.
To move your subject or object: a little more to the left, right, up or down.
To trim away distracting elements, especially at the sides or the near foreground.
To zoom in to show impact, especially portrait or head-shots.
To use the rule of odds – instead of two subjects just use one.
For creative cropping – rotate image, use perspective crop.

Let’s take the first example, I took this shot handheld when I should have used a tripod. An uneven horizon line does not make for a good composition. The eye is immediately drawn there, for the wrong reason.

Seascape with a crooked horizon line.

However, this is easily remedied in most photo editing programs. As Adobe Photoshop CS6 is my go-to photo editing software. I will be referencing it for the rest of this article.

Once you click on the Crop Tool in the Tools panel, there is a dedicated straighten button in the Options Bar.

Click on the Crop Tool in the Tools panel. Go up to the the Options Bar where there is a dedicated Straighten button. Make sure this is selected, click and drag along the crooked horizon line. Release it, and Photoshop straightens the line and crops the image in one action! The same process can equally be applied to vertical lines.

Horizon lines are easily fixed using the Crop Tool in Photoshop.

The Crop Tool in Photoshop CS6 is impressive. It now works non-destructively. But you must make sure Delete Cropped Pixels isn’t ticked up in the Options Bar (leaving this box unticked keeps cropped portions which can be recovered later if needed).

The Crop Tool in Photoshop CS6 works non-destructively if the Delete Cropped Pixels box is unchecked.

Inside most editing programs there is usually a choice of overlay guides, based on traditional compositional concepts like the Rule of Thirds or the Golden Ratio. You can read more about Composition in this article: Easy Tips to Help Beginners Understand Composition The crop overlays are great visual guides for good compositional techniques and makes it much easier to crop your image. I usually set it to Rule of Thirds.

So in the next image, I wanted the focus of this shot to be entirely on the sunflowers. The background, although blurred, is still too distracting with the color of the garments worn by the passersby.

Although the background is blurred, the colour of the garments worn by the passersby is too distracting.

I started with one of the aspect ratio presets. These can be found under this tab Unconstrained. I selected 5 x 7.

There are various preset aspect ratios when you click on the Unconstrained tab. You can also save your own presets too.

I dragged the top right corner handle of the crop box down, and in towards the centre, to maintain this aspect ratio. By clicking on the image inside the crop box, I was able to move and reposition the image into place.

The sunflowers are now the main focus point in this image, and the green blurred background is complimentary, without being a distraction.

I am strong believer in using my feet to get close to the subject, or if you have a nice telephoto lens, then happy days. Unfortunately for my next shot, I didn’t have the option of either of the above.

I was at the zoo on a family outing, so I wasn’t taking dedicated shots for anyone. I was behind a barrier and a good 30 feet (approx.) away from the seals. I didn’t get time to think or compose for this shot. I just wanted to grab a shot of the seals.

Seals taken at the zoo.

The day was fantastic weather wise, and these seals were really enjoying the sunshine. I wanted to crop in tightly, just on the seals, but I had the megapixels to play with because I had a 24 megapixel camera with me, which can produce a 20×13” at 300 dpi print. The final crop for this image would give me 5.5×4” at 300 dpi print.

I cropped in tight to get a close-up of the seals. I didn’t like the railings at the back, but I would have preferred to have kept the reflection of the seals in the water, but there is always a trade off!

In this next shot, cropping in tight on a subject can convey more impact, especially for portrait shots. No two people reveal the same expression. As a photographer, some subjects are easier to capture an expression over others.

Emmet and Lucy enjoying the nice weather and the chat!

I wanted to convey Lucy looking at Emmet in an adoring fashion, I-only-have-eyes-for-you type of expression.

Lucy hanging on to every word that Emmet is saying! The look of I-only-have-eyes-for-you!

Another way to convey impact is to focus on the action. Here, in this shot below, I cropped out my other daughter, so that the focus was on my youngest daughter running to shore.

Fun at the beach.

By cropping out my other daughter, the focus is on the action. It’s also using the Rule of Odds to focus on the single subject.

Cropping an image is a great way to apply the Rule of Odds. A good example of this is in the following shot. The two subjects are side-by-side. By cropping in tight on each subject, I have created two distinct head-shots from one single image.

Two subjects shot sitting on a bench side-by-side.

After the image is cropped, I now have two distinct portraits.

Last but by not least, try and experiment with rotating your image to the left or right, and then cropping. This may be particularly useful with photos of tall buildings, where you want the focus to be on the height of the building.

I had taken the following photo in Berlin some years back from a boat on the river Spree. This modern building was quite impressive, but the reflection of the sky and clouds in the glass, caught my eye. It made for a nice abstract composition.

A shot of a building while in a boat on the river Spree in Berlin. Compositionally, this by itself is not a good shot.

The Crop Tool in Photoshop has another feature, the Perspective Crop Tool. When you click on the Crop Tool and hold, a fly-out menu appears with four options. The Perspective Crop Tool is directly under the Crop Tool.

With some editing to highlight the reflection in the glass of this building, I used the Perspective Crop Tool to create an abstract composition.

Starting at one corner, click and drag across to the other corner, and repeat around the lines of the window frame. A grid appears around where you have clicked within the image. Click the commit button at the top in the Options Bar, or press the enter key. Make finer adjustments by clicking back to the regular Crop Tool.

The perspective Crop Tool in action.

I created this abstract composition using the Perspective Crop Tool in Photoshop.

Cropping is, after-all, getting an alternative perspective to enhance a better composition.

To crop or not to crop, that is the question? Share your comments and images below please.

This week on dPS we’re featuring a series of articles about composition. Many different elements and ways to compose images for more impact. Check out the ones we’ve done so far:

Using Framing for More Effective Compositions
7 Tips to Improve Your Skyline Photos
33 Images that Exemplify Compositional Elements
Weekly Photography Challenge – Composition Craziness
How to Take Control of Aperture and Create Stronger Photos

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The post How Cropping in Post-Production Can Improve Composition by Sarah Hipwell appeared first on Digital Photography School.

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Make the Cut With Cropping

21 Oct

Cropping your photos isn’t always super intuitive. With new crops available on Instagram, it’s time we looked into when and how to crop perfectly

This article by Vladimir Gendelman goes through 15 easy-to-remember cropping tips. He includes great beginner advice on the rule of thirds as well as stuff you might not have thought about.

Don’t crop people at the joints – This makes the viewer uncomfortable, so unless you’re going for that feel, avoid it.
Allow breathing room – If your subject is staring off in the distance, give them some space to stare into. Otherwise you’ll leave your viewers feeling a bit claustrophobic.
Keep the hair – Don’t crop too close to the hairline, you want to leave enough hair in the photo so the viewer can easily visualize the rest.

Photo by David D

Photojojo

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Composition After the Fact: Cropping for Maximum Impact

10 Aug

It may at first seem simple. You took the shot a little wide, or a sneaky branch that you didn’t notice found its way into the edge of your photo. In Lightroom (LR) it’s just a quick press of the R key to activate the crop tool, hold down the shift key to constrain the crop so you don’t get a weird aspect ratio, and your task is complete.

The crop tool – simple, yet powerful.

On the contrary, cropping is one of the more powerful tools that you have at your disposal to dial in the composition of your images. Prime lens users will also find that the limited versatility (compared to zoom lenses) can result in the need for cropping more often.

First, let me make the caveat that many aspects of photography are highly subjective. Some of the information and advice offered in this article is my personal opinion, and is the approach I take to create images that fit my style. Personal preference always prevails. Anything called a rule is only so because a common pattern was identified within compositions that are considered especially attractive.

In many respects cropping echoes the fundamental principles of composition. Luckily, if you didn’t get what you wanted the first time around, when you took the photo, you get a second chance, albeit limited, to recompose your images in post-production for maximum impact.

The Basics

The very first thing I look for, and correct, in any photograph that I edit is straight lines. Horizon lines and any vertical lines that are near the edges of the image, should be straight. It absolutely drives me crazy when I see photos with crooked lines.

That being said, lines can be crooked, but it better be obvious that was the intent, otherwise it just looks like careless composition or lazy editing. In the right context a skewed horizon can add drama, and make an image more dynamic.

Crooked horizons can make viewers cringe unless the intent is obvious.

Make this your first step in cropping, because depending on how radically you have to rotate the image you may be forced to crop the edges of the image.

If you have the time when composing the shot, and your camera has a built-in virtual horizon feature for levelling, by all means do so. I have delegated a customizable button on the front of my camera for activating this feature, and I use it all the time.

With the crop tool activated in LR (keyboard shortcut R) there are a few ways to straighten out an image:

Drag the Angle slider left or right
Click on the value to the right of the slider and drag left or right (scrubby slider)
Click on the numerical value and enter whatever you want
Hold the CTRL key while dragging along a straight horizontal or vertical line (will correct on either axis) and LR will fix it automatically
Also new in LR6 (LR CC) is the “Auto” feature for the crop tool. Just click it and see how it does – then tweak as necessary.

Elimination

A senior photojournalist at a newspaper I once interned for, gave me a memorable piece of advice while critiquing my photos, he said, “crop until it hurts.” It was his way of telling me that I was leaving too much dead or negative space in my compositions.

To this day his advice always resurfaces in my mind when I’m editing images, especially with portraits or other photos with people in them. Fight the urge to become attached to pixels. Crop out half of the photo if need be. Unimportant areas of a photo are not precious real estate.

You can’t always get as close to the action as you would like (or it is safe to do so) and heavy-handed cropping can make all the difference.

The fact of the matter is that simple is better. We all suffer from attention deficit disorder, and viewers usually don’t want to spend too much precious time analyzing a photo to get the story. Consider the allure of silhouette images. When cropping look for simple compositions and try to distill the scene down to its essence.

Once the image is rotated and you’ve been forced to chop off some of the edges, look for elements that detract, distract or add little to the image. You may not have a choice but to include them, but it’s good practice to be cognizant of them and it may help guide the rest of your editing process or future compositions.

You see many images where the photographer is too conservative when cropping portraits or photos of people. Again, each photo is different, and there is no magic formula, but for example, I find that tight profile shots of people grab my eye more when they are cropped in really close. I am not afraid to cut off the back of the subject’s head, putting their ear in the upper corner of the image, or even cropping the ear out.

Cropping in very tight can sometimes create a more powerful image.

Negative space can play an important role, especially if shooting for a publication where they need space for text. But, the nice thing about having post-processing options is that you can always revert back to the original. If you compose your images super tight in camera, you can’t get that negative space back.

Leading Lines

Although thoughtfully composing your shots through the viewfinder is one of the more rudimentary skills in photography, there are often distractions. You may find surprises when you pull up the final image on your computer screen.

In photography, as well as painting and other forms of art, you should always be thinking about the arrangement of elements in the image that are going to draw in the viewer’s eye. A compelling subject is just that, but it is your job as photographer to strive to portray that subject in the most powerful, or striking way possible.

Utilizing leading lines to draw in the viewer's eye.

It’s easy to overlook compositional elements while shooting moving subjects. Post -processing cropping reveals additional possibilities for framing your shots like using leading lines to draw in the viewer’s eye.

When we talk about leading lines it’s not always an obvious straight line. Often it is an invisible thread that takes the viewers’ gaze hostage and leads it through the scene. Think of a series of elements that create a pattern.

Diagonal lines which stretch towards the subject are a common, and effective, way to create interest and tension in an image.

Using Crop Overlays as Guidance

In all of its ingenious glory, LR has included several overlays in the Crop tool to help guide your cropping endeavors. There is a basic grid, the Rule of Thirds, the Golden Ratio, the Golden Triangles, diagonals and the Golden Spiral. With the Crop tool active, the keyboard shortcut O cycles through the various overlays and Shift+O rotates the overlay where applicable.

Personally, I find myself using the Rule of Thirds overlay most often. The Rule of Thirds says that when two horizontal and two vertical lines are drawn across the frame to divide it into equal thirds, the subject or elements of interest, should be placed on, or near the intersection of those lines.

The rule of thirds suggests that the subject be placed at the intersection of lines that separate the image into thirds.

An easy mistake to make is placing the horizon line right in the middle of the frame. This is generally considered a no-no, and is a significant compositional faux pas. The Rule of Thirds overlay gives you those handy horizontal lines for recomposing your photo.

The Golden Ratio and Golden Spiral overlays are closely related. There are a bunch of names for this formula including Phi, the Golden Mean and Fibonacci’s ratio. The Golden Ratio grid employs the same basic concept as the Rule of Thirds. I find that the Golden Spiral really isn’t much different, and is more useful to consider in your original composition, instead of trying to apply it after the fact.

The Golden Triangles overlay shows a diagonal line drawn from one corner to another with two branching lines to the other two corners separating the image into four triangles. This gives you a guide for aligning diagonal leading lines, and a suggested location for the subject at the intersection of the lines.

The diagonal overlay calls for placing elements of interest along 45-degree lines drawn across the image. Although the overlay is meant to fine tune this alignment in post-processing, it has been found that artists tend toward this layout intuitively.

The Moral of the Story

Cropping in post-processing is far more than just a simple tool to tighten up composition. Experimenting with various crops of the same image can help you develop an eye for the hidden compositions in a photo.

After you familiarize yourself with the possibilities, you will likely find yourself looking back through your photo library to revisit old images, in order to give them fresh compositions.

Photography is all about seeing, not just looking, and sometimes instead of taking a step back to see the big picture, you need to take a step forward to discover the small one.

What is your thought process when cropping in post-production?

The post Composition After the Fact: Cropping for Maximum Impact by Jeremie Schatz appeared first on Digital Photography School.