A photography tip for everyone. By "Crop" I don't mean the noun meaning of farming crop but rather the action of "cutting something very short." In photography, the term is used to means cutting part of the image. In editing software or on your phone, the cropping tool is usually represented by a sort of square with over lapping lines, that didn't help you can admit.
In this post, we'll dig a little further to see why you may want to crop your images.
Why Crop?
There are many reasons, as I just said correcting the horizon may be one of them. But mainly, you want to crop to improve your image or make it fit a certain format.
Adjusting for a certain format
My blog banners, for example, are in a 1:2 format (they are 2 times wider than high) which is not a dimension my camera takes images in. To make those banners I crop the image I want to fit the 1:2 format and I'm good.
Even though photo labs give you the option of cropping when you send in your photos you may want to do them yourself before to have better control. If you print 8x10 photos (4:5 ratio), you'll most probably have to crop your images as not many cameras take images in that format. I'm not going to go into too many details for now but be aware that printing in a certain format will cut off parts of your images.
Improving your image
You may just want to crop your image because you only want a part of the image. Maybe you were not able to get close enough to your subject and want to remove what's around. Or maybe you just want to remove your drunk uncle who tried to photobomb your family pictures.
In many cases, a small crop will improve your image by a lot, I'll make a future post just on composition but sometimes slightly cropping to align your subject within the frame will make a huge difference in the quality of the image. Let's face it, no one always gets their pictures perfectly framed and straight every time.
What about image quality?
If you're wondering how much you can cut off an image before it's too small. In a nutshell, I wouldn't worry too much if you don't plan on making large prints and by large I mean over 15 inches prints.
As an example, here's how much I removed from my banner image and it still looks sharp.
In general, today's cameras (including phones) take very large images which can be cut into a lot. My camera is 21 Megapixels and I believe most phone cameras are now about 12 Megapixels so you may not be able to be as aggressive as me but close nonetheless.
For phone users here are two articles that show how to crop images on your phone:
So go ahead and crop your images, experiment to see how you can improve your images just by cropping. Let me know what you thoughts are in the comments below or if you have further questions.
Thanks for watching! ... huh no I mean reading!