Hot answers tagged cropping
38
No, it does not have much use.
Digital zoom is a restricted form of cropping:
It is always done around the center.
It is constrained to certain fixed increments.
It is limited in quality by the firmware of the camera.
On the other hand, cropping can:
Be of arbitrary size.
Be taken from any part of the image.
Be processed using a variety of ...
19
Q: When is it OK to place the subject in the middle of a picture?
A: Whenever you feel that it works best!
The general rule of not centering your subject is time-honored, and comes from one basic idea: the center of an image is a stable, straightforward place. When you put something there visually, it stays there visually, usually resulting in a static ...
16
I think an important advantage is saving time. When you happen to shoot hundreds of photos in a row stuck with a lens wider than would be optimal, cropping each one of the images into a smaller size in post processing would be quite tedious - usually you can't do that in batch unless you really don't care about resulting framing. Framing on spot, on the ...
16
Same photo will result from using digital zoom or cropping.
Advantage of digital zoom: you don't need a computer to crop it. You can upload straight to Facebook, print it out, etc. Cropping is a very common post-processing technique and this lets you do it easily, on the fly.
Advantages of cropping after the fact: you can take more time to compose the crop ...
12
ImageMagick, using the -trim operator. See: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/crop/#trim.
ImageMagick is free (and open source), and you can get pre-built binaries for Mac OS, Windows, or Unix from http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php.
9
When you select the crop tool the toolbar offers some features to make cropping to proportions easy:
Pick the Crop tool and in the toolbar pick the crop icon with dropdown arrow, where you'll see presets. Pick one and use it.
No preset exists for the crop you want? Create it by entering the specifics in the fields to the right of the field: width, height, ...
9
Photoshop's Batch command can do this. You would essentially 'record' yourself performing the crop etc once, then run the recording on all the files you want. If you want to automatically resize the smaller images you would have to do a little scripting.
Irfanview also has a comprehensive image batch processor but might require a bit of experimentation to ...
8
I personally only crop when, aesthetically, it has a lot to do with the subject or the limitations of having to simply take the photograph with the 3:2 aspect ratio with the camera. For example, I took a photo of a mate of mine in landscape when I could have, in hindsight, tilted the tripod mount to portrait and taken it, but because I was in the shoot ...
8
@mattdm has given a nice overview. I'll add some specific situations where middle might turn out to give the best composition:
When you have a subject looking straight at camera and no directional lighting, placing the subject to a side would often feel synthetic. Especially so with a tighter crop. Your photo is an example of this category.
Photos with ...
8
First you want to start with the best selection possible. Here you have some choices.
Select using lasso, quick select (not ideal unless you want to do lots of adjusting). If you do use these, once you've made the best selection you can, click on the Refine Edge button in the tool bar and use the sliders to inteligently adjust your selection.
Near ...
7
Never seen an imaging software that could not do that, so yes, you can do this.
Adobe Lightroom has a great tool to do that which is interactive. It does cost money, so I would not buy it just for that (there are excellent reasons to do so though).
Google Picasa is free and can do that. Look for the menu item that says 'Straighten'.
It does not matter ...
7
When cropping a photo, I try to do/achieve several things:
Center:
the subject, when it is slightly more on one side. Of course, in some photos, putting the subject in the corner is done to achieve an artistic effect, but I'm not talking about those cases.
the scene, for example when the horizon is too low or too high.
Remove:
the elements which ...
7
A huge factor you should consider is how many print sizes will you end up making from the images. If you decide on a single size, go ahead and crop the images exactly how you want using that ratio.
If you are planning to print the images to various sizes, consider the aspect ratio of each size. It may be better to crop the images at the time you print ...
7
Cropping in General
First off, some words about cropping in general. Fundamentally, cropping is not any different than composing in camera. The same general guidelines apply, and the same outcomes can be achieved with cropping as with composing in-camera. An important symmetry that might not be quite so obvious to a beginner.
As with any composition, ...
7
Lightroom gives some good cropping tools, IMO. Press "R" or go to the Develop module and click the crop tool below the histogram (though it sounds like you know that part).
To set the aspect ratio, in the Crop & Straighten tool area is an "Aspect" row, and from a drop-down you can select predefined aspect ratios, create a custom aspect ratio, or just ...
6
Your best bet is probably to crop the photos when printing, especially if you are unfamiliar with editing photos on your PC. Most of the photo terminals at supermarkets I've seen have had the ability to let you rotate and crop photos.
You will lose resolution when doing this, to avoid pixelation when printing you really need 300ppi (pixels per inch) for a ...
6
I'm not sure there are any tools that will completely automate this process, unless you're willing to write a custom script.
I sometimes have to crop quite a few images at work, and one of the simplest tools that I have come across for this is a small image editor called IrfanView. It's not the prettiest of programs, but can do a crop and move on to the ...
6
Aspect ratio can also provide sense of mood or motion. Look at the photo given by Nick Bedford earlier and see how it changes by merely changing the square ratio to 16:9
... or 9:16:
6
If you don't know the crop boundary then you can use Fred Weinhaus's multicrop script (this script also uses Imagemagick). The script also handles different photo sizes and rotated images.
Example (book covers):
Scanned image (input.tiff):
multicrop input.tiff output.tiff
Result:
output-0.tiff:
output-1.tiff:
6
ImageMagick let's you run commands in a windows command window. You need to be comfortable with creating Dos batch files.
For an example see the last post in this discussion:
http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=21112
Relevant example from this forum post:
@echo off
cd C:\Users\user\Desktop\New\New folder
convert *.jpg ...
5
You can do this fairly easily in Picasa. Simply select the Crop option, then "Add Custom Aspect Ratio" at the bottom of the crop options. This will allow you to select a custom size such as 8x8, then export export it as such. Below I have some screenshots to assist.
5
Photoshop has a function exactly for that:
Scan your cover (you can even scan multiple covers in one scan)
In Menu: Automate > Crop and Straighten Photos
It automatically crop and fix the rotation of the photos in the current file. If multiple photos are found in the image, it will automatically split in several files. If you have ton of them, you can ...
5
The histogram in Lightroom 3 does change. Here's an example:
Full frame
Cropped
You'll note that the cropped image has more image information in the top third of the histogram, whereas the uncropped one has more in the lower third. That's what you would expect. So the question is, why aren't you observing this? Are you using Lightroom 3?
5
There are a couple of ways of centring a crop in Lightroom.
If you hold down Alt (Windows) / Option (Mac) as you drag a crop handle you get a symmetrical crop around the centre of the image.
To centre a crop on a specific point other than the centre of the image, go into Crop mode then keep pressing O to toggle between the various crop overlays. If you ...
5
First I thought you wanted batch resize, which many programs can do.
But then I realized you want to do a combination of resizing and cropping, and you want the computer to calculate how to best cut out 600x600 pixels from the image dynamically.
It is because it is not a "one true solution" kind of task, as it is usually human judgement call, how to crop ...
4
Usually, when cropping a photo, be it for print or other uses (like my blog), I look at a few things in the picture. Sometimes the picture contains unwanted elements; things I didn't notice when taking the picture, or, because my viewfinder only has a 95% coverage, things end up in the picture at the edges just because I couldn't see them.
For me, cropping ...
4
Yes, when saving to JPEG, the digital zoom is useful! Looking at the answers, it is surprising how many people is not aware of it!
1) you will achieve better quality. Just make a test and you will see.
There is a JPEG artifact, which works at few-pixel scale, and this artifact will be enlarged as you will crop and zoom the image in post-process. It is ...
4
Most cameras have an anti-aliasing filter that can both reduce observed detail and moire patterns, especially when the image is viewed at 100%.
The practice I follow is to do all my toning and cropping at the image's original size and then size the image down to the size I need it to be and then apply a sharpening tool to the image, like Photoshop's ...
4
Unfortunately automated kiosks do stupid things. Get a human to print these things and tell him that what you want out because he cant read your mind.
What is happening is that there is a discrepancy between the aspect ratio of your photos and the aspect ratio of the kiosks output.
For example, the most common print is a 6" x 4" which has a 3:2 aspect ...
4
In general the advantage of a sharper lens disappears very quickly once you start cropping and enlarging the image.
You can use the lens resolution to work this out: if your lens resolves 100 line pairs per mm and you have to enlarge by a factor of 2 then your effective resolution is 50 line pairs per mm.
These resolution figures are rarely supplied by ...
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