How do I find out the dimensions of cropped regions and center the crop?

Question

Let's say, in Lightroom 5, I have applied a lot of crop adjustments to a photo: crop horizontally, crop vertically, rotate and change aspect ratio. Now I want to see how how many pixels I've cropped out on all four sides. For example, if I have a 1000 pixel high photo, and I've cropped it to 600px, I might have cropped out 100 pixels from the top, and 300 from the bottom. Can Lightroom show me this information?

Further, can I ask Lightroom to vertically center the crop, so that in case, we'd have 200 pixels cropped off the top, and 200px off the bottom. I'd like to leave everything else the same — horizontal position of the crop rectangle within the photo, size of the crop, rotation, aspect ratio, etc. Is that possible?

The only solution I could find is using the overlay consisting of small squares, and counting how many there are, which is inexact and crude.

Answer 1

No, Lightroom can't do what you are asking as it doesn't provide any "measurement" tools. Even when you are cropping, you can't force a rectangle of x*y pixels and have instead to indirectly use the image size indication (if it has been activated in the option) in the corner of your image.

At least one plugin in Lightroom provide more options to crop (you can define your croping size in pixels - Rob Cole's XMP CROP) but it won't give you the number of pixels lost around your croped area.

Lightroom can't aligned a croping rectangle respectively to the "original" picture (= the one at the previous editing step) either. If you have 300 px on top and 100 px at the bottom of your cropped area, Lightroom can't move your rectangle to magically have 200 px on each side.

You can do both with Photoshop :

• Measuring : https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/16043/finding-the-distance-between-two-guides-in-photoshop
• Aligning : https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/16757/how-to-control-alignment-with-a-reference-layer