On When To Crop

[nickjohnson]

For me – and I suspect most of those of us who have their images printed - cropping is a fact of photographic life. Nothing on the output side of the house (prints, screens, projectors) is in the 3:2 format of most of our digital cameras. So we have to crop – and for me I try and do that as part of my visualisation process.
Now when It comes to really cropping an image I tend to do that fairly early in the pp workflow – for technical reasons I wont bother with here. So when I present a piece of work here at the Café, it's in the form that I (hopefully) pre-visulised – including the crop.
That is all fine and dandy, but there is a problem. Because I've committed myself to a particular crop early in the pp workflow, I'm also restricting the help that others can give me – to only include the bits I show, and not the full image. If someone needs the full image to give me some help, I have to go back to square one and reproduce everything I've done. Not Good.
So from now on I'm going to make cropping the last (ish) step in my pp. Or at least I will until I change my mind – again!
So – what think you?

[jeeperman]

Nick, sounds good to me. While I also visualize before pressing the shutter, it is at least a little subjective. Certainly when shooting birds and such I will need some cropping to bring up the details I want.

I have a prior vision but always crop last thing. Sometimes I will crop a couple different ways to see what fits my initial feel best. This can change as your PP sometimes brings forward characteristics that were not as prominant in your viewfinder.

I try to get it as right as I can in camera but why limit my possabilities if a slight change gives me a closer replication to the overall feel of what was in my head at the time of capture.

I find I rarely crop much with my landscapes but when shooting these darn birds with only 400mm it is needed more times than not due to not reaching the scene I am trying to capture. Funny how short 400mm is when shooting small subjects.

[clactonian]

What software do you use Nick? I'm curious because most photographic programs these days enable non-destructive edits, which would make the process of revisiting an image fairly straightforward.
I certainly understand the cropping dilemma, but find Lightroom so useful with its ability to simply create any number of virtual copies at any stage of the editing workflow. This enables me to try and keep (if I want) various crops. I must admit that I do however complete any basic adjustments before creating virtual copies.

[Barry]

When I edit a image, I edit the whole file as it came out the camera, this is then saved as a Tiff file. I will then open and resize/crop to fit the output that I want to use image for and save it as a Jpeg, leaving my Tiff file alone.

[nickjohnson]

Thanks to all for your responses – interesting reading – will have another think about this.
My workflow is very complicated to describe – but actually easy in practice. It involves DXO, LRv4, CS5, and SEPv2 for B&W.
The dilemma that I overcome by cropping early in LR is that I can shoot an image with a deliberately blown highlight area - provided that area is not in my pre-visulised version of the shot. Doing things that way, I can ETTR the part I do want and maximise that part's signal / noise ratio. Once I've done the early crop none of my adjustments are influenced or compromised by the blown area of highlight that I never intended to use – but was forced to include in the original image – due to the fixed proportions of the camera image frame.

[clactonian]

Jun 19, 2012 9:33:18 GMT nickjohnson said:

Thanks to all for your responses – interesting reading – will have another think about this.
My workflow is very complicated to describe – but actually easy in practice. It involves DXO, LRv4, CS5, and SEPv2 for B&W.
The dilemma that I overcome by cropping early in LR is that I can shoot an image with a deliberately blown highlight area - provided that area is not in my pre-visulised version of the shot. Doing things that way, I can ETTR the part I do want and maximise that part's signal / noise ratio. Once I've done the early crop none of my adjustments are influenced or compromised by the blown area of highlight that I never intended to use – but was forced to include in the original image – due to the fixed proportions of the camera image frame.

Sounds far too complicated for me Nick. I just twiddle a few knobs and hope for the best, as you can no doubt tell !!

[cannockwolf]

i do the cropping and 'final' sharpening in lightroom to the edited psd, (not the raw file) hence i can change at will

[chrisc]

Do you flatten your PSD file then sharpen or sharpen on the last layer?

[cannockwolf]

i dont sharpen in ps, the un-flattened psd file gets re-imported back into lightroom and i put the none destructive sharpening and cropping on it there, so i can change it at will, i always put a little pre-sharpening on the raw file when its brought in though.

I use lightroom and PS as if it were one program really, and love it.