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Cropping


vicky2

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What are the various philosophies on cropping that are out there? Is there

a "common" or most popular philosophy on cropping? I'm thinking in terms of

the following... General professional view of cropping after the fact vs.

during shooting? Is there some specific height/width ratio that should be

maintained when I crop?

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I think you should crop to the proportions that best fit the image. The world is not in 2:3 proportions so why should every picture of it? At the same time, cropping from film or digital image should be minimised as it always reduces image quality.
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Hello Vicky,

 

If you are cropping for impact... then where the picture will be viewed can determine what works. eg; the space around an image can make impact at a distance but make the same image look a bit odd close up. A 1:1.61 ratio can look fabulous if used well and be a failure elsewhere, a square, an oval? They all have a place. A photo for a mag, size of the page...newpaper pic, to fit. A4, US Letter, it just goes on and on.....like me if I get too excited!

 

Shoot yourself with a smile.

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As mentioned, cropping will reduce your final print quality so I'd suggest that cropping become a last resort option. Cropping can become a bit of a crutch if relied on too much. Better to stop and think about how you want your image to look and move about to make it look that way on the ground glass. One of my favorite photographers Lisette Model cropped many of her images and it doesn't make me think any less of her for doing so.
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This is a deceptively simple question. I can't tell you what approach or method is the most common. Here's what I think. I used to shoot a lot of slides "in the day." Slide shooting teaches you to make the picture you see in the viewfinder as much like the finished result as possible because there is no simple practical way to change the image after the fact to fix mistakes. Through imagination and the practice of seeing pictures as finished images at the time you take them you can be more disciplined in selecting what part of the subject to keep and what to throw away. This is, after all, what cropping is all about. The approach to previsualization that make the best sense for me at the camera is to ask questions such as, Where do the sight lines go in the scene I see?, What part of the picture is the most interesting?, Does anything get in the way or distract my attention away from the subject?, Is the subject big enough?, & etc. There is no mystical notion of what a subject might look like as a photographic print for me. It's just a matter of thinking through an approach to selective viewing that produces a pleasing result. A good job behind the camera can save a lot of work later on. The guys over in the Philosophy forum will have to figure out if method serves art or art serves method.

 

There is also a mechanical aspect to cropping others have mentioned. The slide projector shows the whole image on a screen. Cropping is possible, and can be done by masking the slide to block off parts you don't want to see. The image gets better, but smaller. You can adjust the size of your pictures for prints, of course, and, as for the screen in the slide example, the physical size of the photographic paper is very important. Print sizes unlike the slide example are fixed by convention to three main ones. The 4"x5" and 5"x7" are traditional favorites based on the idea that a large sheet of paper can be cut down without losing the proportions of their sizes. Thus a 16"x20" sheet produces four 8"x10" sheets that may also be cut into 4"x5" pieces for making smaller prints. 5"x7" works the same way. Wallet size pictures are 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" and 10" x 14" enlargements based on the 5"x7" dimensions are commmon as well. Another size, the 4"x6" picture, is also popular, but there don't seem to be many derivatives of this size. Costco will produce a 12"x18" enlargement for customers.

 

I like to crop pictures to fit the paper size I want without the photo processor cutting anything off and without any image stretching for fit. On this point I really like WYSIWYG!

 

Find the minimum resolution you need for making prints by multiplying the printer resolution in DPI by the size of print you want. Call the result "pixels" and use it as a measure to crop your pictures. What image pixels have in common with printer dots per inch is that each of them is the smallest unit built into these devices capaple of reproducing one color. I would use 106 pixels/in for standard printing at Costco, for example, but if I printed my own pictures or used a lab having higher resolution printers, I would use those resolutions instead. A 4"x6" picture printed full frame at Costco uses an image at least 640 pixels by 426 pixels. The image can be bigger so long as the proportions stay the same, but it cannot be smaller.

 

I use the highest resolution my camera makes for general photography. It's a 5MP and the image size is 2,592x1,944 pixels. Calculate the largest 4"x6" picture possible for this image by dividing the screen width by 6 and then multiply the result by 4. 2595/6 = 432 * 4 = 1728. This means that the processor will cut 216 pixels off the long sides of an image to make it fit the paper. This amounts to 1/2" in the finished print. 4"x5" takes a little less and 5"x7" takes a little more. 216 pixels is very hard to see in a camera display, so I apply the notion that when I move in close to fill the image with the subject (a good thing), I must allow room along the long side of the screen for the waste that will be cut away for cropping or I will lose an edge of my picture (a bad thing!). Picasa does a nice job of showing you what cropping will do by drawing a box over the picture that changes both its height and width as you resize it.

 

Certain techniques such as vignetting and feathering the edges of an image can make small pictures attractive in prints. Framing and matting provide the means to mask finished prints to further select the parts that make the best art. There are many examples of wonderful framing done with software here on PN that accent various shapes and proportions that would not fit on standard print paper.

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Ask yourself what are you going to use the image for. I make sure that I shoot with enough room to crop, simply because I can't (usually) add more room to any image, but I can take it away. That's why I always shoot in RAW, NOT JPEG. If you shoot JPEG files, you won't have the quality when you do a serious crop, unless they are very large JPEG's. But RAW, or even TIFF if you don't have RAW, is the best capture.
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