crop? When?

[dominic lantz]

When is it better to crop? When the file is at .psw or .jpeg?

 

All files will end up as .jpeg

 

 

 

~Thanks~

[gdanmitchell]

Always better to do as little as possible to a jpg, especially if it involves opening a jpg,

changing it, and saving again. jpg is a lossy compression system so each save loses some

data from the photo. Convert to jpg as the very last step.

 

(In addition, jpg is 8-bit and your original files might well have greater bit depth that will be

lost when you convert. However, bit depth would not be so relevant if you are simply

cropping a non-jpg format.)

 

Dan

[dominic lantz]

Thank you

[v.anisimov]

What Dam said. Sometimes you don't have a choice but crop/edit a JPG. Save it as a TIF then - no loss!

[jbq]

My rule of thumb is to not save a lossily compress any picture more than twice, and to not compress twice in a row without some actual editing in between.

 

so (ignoring the case of lossless JPEG compression), you should crop before saving as a JPEG.

[ellis_vener_photography]

If you shoot raw files and use Adobe camera Raw 3.x to process, you'll seethat thee is a crop option in the menu bar a t top. You get a few preset crop ratios and a custom ratio crop option. So like all processing steps in ACR, the crop you use is jjust part of the instruction set so if you crop in ACR the good news is thhat after you output as a TIFF or PSD file that version is cropped the way you want. The BETTER news is that the original raw image remains uncropped. Yo ucan go through the entire folder of raw images, crop and frame each the way you want, click done and then inBridge, choose the iamges you want (from one to the entire folder, then in the Bridge toolbar go to Tools > Photoshop > Image Processor and select the size (in pixels) that you want the output to be in, assign the sRGB colorspace and add your copyright to the iamge's meta data. The click on the Run button and go have a cup of coffee or call a client while everything is done for you.