The Photography Tip of the Week #072
The land of Crop-a-lot
There is whole discussion one could have on cropping focused solely on whether one should crop or not. That discussion would go into whether you should use cropping as a way of making a photo better verses getting it framed properly in camera. This isn’t that discussion.
We are going to assume that you do crop and you have a need to crop your image. Those needs often fall into one of the following situations:
1) You want to create an image that will be the right size or aspect ratio for you final output. This is by far the most common reason for cropping. You can’t force your camera to make an image in camera that’s the perfect aspect ratio or final pixel size of the intended use. And you probably wouldn’t want a camera that did that in the first place. Even if you did know exactly what and where the image’s final destination, doing absolutely everything in camera is a bit silly and counter productive since most likely you’ll need the photo a different size.
Cropping for aspect ratio
2) The second most often reason for cropping is to get rid of something in the image, be it extra people, vehicles or your light stand with the umbrella protruding into the frame. These are things that were never meant to be in the image in the first place, but for some reason you couldn’t get them out of the way or you just didn’t see them there when you pushed the shutter button.
Crop unnecessary info
Most people think that’s these are only two reasons for cropping but there is a third:
3) The third reason for cropping is to correct the angle of the image. So you think correcting the angle of the image isn’t cropping? You may be right, but cropping does occur when you fix the angle of the photo so everything isn’t sliding off the end. This may be unnecessary information in your image, but it’s still cropped.
Crop to fix angle
You know three reasons why you crop, but when should you crop? I find so many photographers crop their images before they even color correct them. This is a big mistake. You want to keep as much information in the image during any editing before you crop. Cropping should be the very last operation you perform before sending the photo to print or sizing it for the web. As many new photographers find out rather quickly, if you don’t crop your images before you send them to print, the printer will automatically crop or put borders on your prints, and that just doesn’t look very professional.
5 Comments
Leave a Comment
Feed
Google Plus
Sponsors
Or sign up for a Backblaze account.
Link backs
I am a top photographer in the Mocksville, North Carolina Professional Photographers guide on MarketingTool.com.
Phil,
This is a nice segue to Scott Kelby’s blog this very day regarding 8×10 frames and mattes. Perhaps some of your readers/listeners would find that threat of comments interesting as well.
Didn’t realize that Scott was doing that on his blog. I’ma about a week behind on reading his blog.
By the way, I really should proofread my comments. It wasn’t meant to be a “threat” (though some of the comments could be taken as such) as much as it should have been “thread.”
Here’s Scott’s article
I noticed the misspelling but I chose not to change it. I don’t like editing other people’s comments. I reserve that for when they use profanity or inappropriate language.