Zoom while cropping in Lightroom Classic

Question

I've got a bunch of paintings that I need to crop in Lightroom, but I want them to be pixel perfect crops. As far as I can tell, there is no way to zoom in while cropping. Without being able to zoom in, it's almost impossible to crop to the correct pixel. I saw someone mention using a second monitor to get a better idea of what they were cropping, but I'm not sure what they're referring to.

Does anyone have a good workflow that they recommend for this sort of problem? The goal is to have all of the paintings level and cropped to their exact edges. Do I just need to use Photoshop? If so, what's the best workflow to export, crop, then re-import to Lightroom?

Answer 1

If you are using a two monitor setup, you can open up a secondary display (F11). You can zoom the secondary monitor to 1:1 (Ctrl+Shift+=, or, Window -> Secondary Display -> Zoom In). This technique is will be frustrating as it takes the secondary monitor display a few seconds to update.

If you need to zoom in while cropping and leveling, export the image to Photoshop (Ctrl+E, or, Photo -> Edit In -> Edit in Adobe Photoshop) or another image editing program like GIMP (Ctrl+Alt+E) where you can zoom in to set your crop edge precisely. If using Photoshop, then going back & forth from LR to PS is painless, although, you'll end up with another copy of your edited image.

Be sure to take advantage of LR's Lens Corrections and Transform before cropping. The transform function can correct for keystoning and auto level your image if you have straight edges (frame edges).