Crop your way to better photos

Cropping a photo is often the best way to improve it. But cropping, useful as it is, also presents some problems. This update deals with both sides of the cropping issue.

First, in case you’ve forgotten, cropping a photo is the art of removing parts of the image, leaving a residue which is necessarily smaller than the original. “Smaller” here refers to file size – the fact is that when you crop you toss out data, and that can can come back to bite you if you don’t follow a good workflow. More on that later.

Even if there’s a potential penalty to pay in cropping, there are plenty of benefits. Here’s what cropping can do for you and your pictures:

• Exclude unwanted material that adds no value to the shot
• Focus on the essential elements of the picture
• Improve composition by putting the center of interest in the “right” spot
• Eliminate distractions
• Alter the story your picture is telling (and every picture tells, or should tell, a story)
• Fit your image to an appropriate size for framing, yearbook use, etc
• Save work “fixing” portions of the picture by removing the bad areas altogether

Cropping and composition are tightly linked. It’s often said that the best place to crop is in your viewfinder, prior to clicking the shutter. That’s usually true, but there’s a downside: if your picture is perfectly framed and perfectly composed in the camera, you cannot later reformat from, say, 3:2 to 5:4 aspect ratio without doing grievous bodily harm to your art. You’ll save work (and definitely become a better photographer by perfectly composing your work in camera) but you do create some limitations by framing your picture so that there’s no room to crop!

Most of us don’t have that problem. Our pictures are rarely shot with perfect composition, and most of us waste much or most of the frame space with stuff that doesn’t help the picture. Zoom lenses help a bit here, but primes are pretty well guaranteed to need cropping because you can’t always move to the right spot to get the picture perfectly composed. Landscape shooters may have no way to get a shrub out of frame, for instance (though I always carry a pocket saw to help with that problem).

Let’s talk about excluding unwanted material, the first reason for cropping a photo.

In this cave picture used by permission of the maker, Dave Braughler, the shooter had a terrible problem – pitch dark location, bright rocks in the foreground, nasty hard-to-light shadows in the center obscuring the central figures.

The image was cropped so as to eliminate most of the distracting bright rocks. The crop was moved to place the central subjects in the best position. Then the remaining bright rocks were burned down and the central area dodged (lightened) to increase the visual importance of the cavers.

So in this case the crop achieved three of the main reasons for cropping: removing needless material, eliminating distractions, and improving the picture’s story-telling. Three for one, this shot only!

Here’s another example:

The first shot shows t entire uncropped frame. It concentrates more on the bunny in its environment. The second is cropped much more tightly. This shot still shows the grasses and dirt for context, but concentrates on the bunny. Cropping the shot increases the importance of the center-of-interest and enhances the story-telling.

You have to make sure the material you’re cropping out is genuinely distracting, wasteful, or technically bad (like the cave rocks above). You can overdo spotlighting the central subject, as in this portrait of a girl and her cello.

In this example, the overall shot is out of balance and full of distractions. The second version eliminates the cello, and we’re left with an inexplicable expression on the girl’s face. If there’s a story in this version, it’s very dark and obscure. The last version concentrates on the girl and her cello; it’s a story-telling shot showing how she and the instrument are emotionally connected.

Cropping for impact

Here’s a shot I loved in its uncropped version. When it showed up as a screensaver, my computer had automatically cropped the excess area, and I really like it much better! There’s enough of the old mine building showing to provide context, but not enough to overpower the flowers. The effect doesn't show so much at small sizes, but at full-screen size it's striking.

Telling the right story, or telling your story right?

Sometimes you crop to enhance or exaggerate some element of your shot. Here I cropped to make this a L-O-N-G story, even though I actually made it one horse shorter! I wanted to change the feel of the shot. Not coincidentally this shot can be used across a double-page magazine spread with room for an article underneath.

Here's another example of changing your story. The original version of this family playing on the banks of New Hampshire's Merrimack River one blistering July day really had three stories going on, and they were competing for each other. Look how the various crops change the story completely!

Original

The girl's story

The guys' story
























The family story This is not quite the same as the first version, because the crop helps us connect the two subjects by an implied diagonal (top left to bottom right) that you don't see  in the original -- too much distraction from the river bank, shrubbery, and the white towel.















Cropping can improve composition by finding the portion of the shot that most closely corresponds to one of the basic organizing strategies for photos. In the case of the cave shot shown above, cropping improved the composition by emphasizing the diagonals in the picture. Composing to emphasize diagonals automatically increases the sense of motion and energy in any photograph. Second, the crop made certain to place the cavers on or right next to the “thirds line,” as in the Rule of Thirds. (To be honest, the original picture was pretty good on this score, but a tweak never hurts).

Workflow and cropping

As I said earlier, the best way to get a picture right is to take it right. But sometimes you simply can’t get rid of a shrub, or get to the perfect position to shoot from. Other times you may want to intentionally leave plenty of room to crop the image down to a different proportion, say, to a 1.9 :1 ratio (panorama) from a 3:2 (standard 35mm format). (On cheap cameras with a “panoramic” setting, all they’re doing is discarding the pixels above and below certain pre-set “crop marks.”)

Assuming you’re going to crop your picture, when should you do it?

There are two schools of thought here. One says crop immediately, and then you only have to edit and correct the part of the image you actually wanted.

The downside of this practice, especially if you shoot in JPEG mode, is that you will find it difficult to go back uphill and recover lost material if you want it later. If you crop, then save the image, the original pixels are gone forever. Of course if you’re shooting RAW, you won’t lose the original pixels, but if you crop then edit, then decide to re-crop the original, you’ll have to re-edit that copy as well. Tedious.

The other approach says do all your editing, then make your crops. Save each crop AS A COPY, then undo the crop you just made on your master file, re-crop, save as copy and undo, etc. You don’t have to re-edit, but you do run the risk of forgetting to undo your most recent crop before re-cropping, in which case you will lose precious pixels forever.

The best practice is to shoot in RAW (your data is never touched, so you can’t lose it). Do as much of your editing as possible in your general photo editing program, such as Lightroom, Aperture, or CaptureOne. Make your crops from within this program. Then, if you really want to get picky, open the file you want to work on in Photoshop and have at it.

When not to crop?

Not every file can or should be cropped. There are both technical and artistic reasons for leaving well enough alone. The artistic reason is if you’ve done the shot perfectly, don’t mess with it – and don’t compromise your great picture by forcing it into some other format. Use borders or vignettes if you must, but DON’T MESS UP A PERFECT IMAGE for the sake of a size rule.

The technical issues mainly have to do with prints. Sorry, but no screen image yet made can carry the detail of a fine-quality print. And printing is where you have to pay the piper for your crops.

The technical reasons boil down to “no free lunch.” The penalty for cropping small files, or for making VERY tight crops in larger ones, is lousy enlargements, at least with most cameras. Here’s what happens. Let’s say your “native” file size yields a 5x7@ 300 dpi. Let’s further say your crop takes out about 67% of those pixels, as in the bunny shot above; your 6 megapixel original image is now a 2 megapixel image (before making a JPEG, which is much smaller, say 300K). If you try to get an 8x10 out of that, you will not be a happy camper. In the case of the bunny picture, the original was 14 megapixels, and the cropped version is about 4.7, so it will print perfectly at 7x9 and can be rezzed-up to larger sizes if needed. The moral of the story: if you want to crop tight and then make large prints, you need all the megapixel horsepower you can get.

At large print sizes, pixels do matter, as does lens quality. Quite simply, a 16 x 20 print from a 6 megapixel camera does not look nearly as good as the same subject shot with a 22 mpx camera. I use three cameras, 12, 14, and 22 megapixels. Sparing you the technical details I can instantly tell which camera was used for any given picture in my files simply by looking at it. The original file of this 57 Chevy is 24 megapixels (RAW). The headlamp detail shot is a 100% crop from the original, unsharpened. Guess which camera was used!

This is an extreme example, but the bottom line is: if you want to make big prints from small crops, you can expect trouble. The only cure is razor-sharp glass and huge numbers of pixels.

The logic of this is simple. An 8x10 has 80 square inches of image. A 4x5 has 20 square inches. A 3x5 has 15 square inches. If you try to crop a 4x5 chunk from an 8x10 file, then blow it back up to 8x10, you’ll have to expand your pixels by a factor of four! That’s when things get ugly. So, the more pixels you have in your 4x5 crop, the bigger they will print without problems. C’est logique, ça!

To sum up, cropping is one of the best and simplest ways to improve your images. Just don’t over do it, and respect the technical issues you may have to deal with. Be careful not to lose your original data; sooner or later it may come in handy!