Crop and Chop
Now that we can enjoy cameras with multi, mega-pixel resolution in their CCDs there is an indulgence and pictorial improvement denied us with earlier models: that is, the role of cropping.
There one single basic skill in photography that no amount of technical cleverness can overcome or bypass: the skill and art of composition — if you ain’t shot it right, no matter of dodging and shuffling can save it. Except for the thoughtful approach of cropping.
Even if you’re dissatisfied with the your efforts after the event, it may still be possible to not only save the shot but take it to higher levels of visual acclaim.
It’s all too easy to shoot a great shot, then a few days later, have second thoughts about its framing. Flaws like too much sky, an excess of picture at the sides or bottom of the picture are all too easy to let slip through. Often, in terms of pictures, less is preferable to more!
With almost any camera sold today the opportunity to crop or select a part of the image is inherent. The examples shown here were shot on three different cameras: a Nikon, a Fujifilm FinePix and a Casio.
The yacht shot (Nikon) has benefitted enormously from cropping, with the final image making a far more satisfying print The dark, meaningless areas at the top of the picture have all gone.
This shot, taken in a city market (Casio), was ‘going nowhere’ before some severe cropping. The final image and delivers an attractive and unusual ‘string bean’ print.
The shot of the Ford Mustang (Fujifilm camera) had potential, only realised when the shot was tipped over to straighten its direction, the top and bottom of the picture removed and the area at top left filled out with some deft rubber stamp work. Now the image has motion in its composition.
Tricks of the Trade
The old adage “if in doubt, leave it out!” applies to image framing. The cautious may prefer to shoot two shots, one the full picture and a companion picture, severely cropped; shoot both and decide later.
27 Responses to “Crop and Chop” - Add Yours
May 31st, 2009 at 9:33 am
There are few very important skill every photographer MUST have.
One – To know to choose the right photo. Anyone can take 1000 photos a day. It takes special skill and ‘eye’ to select the good ones out.
Two – Between those good photos he chose – The right crop (which is actually a part of a right composition). Right composition/crop enhance the main topic, the main idea the photographer tried to pass to his viewer. It’s like being a movie editor – cut out the unimportant, the interfering parts.
In this photo, the woman was surrounded by many hanging/ colorful flowers. I’ve decided to crop those “disturbing” colors out and leave the woman, and her green /orange colors to blend into her surrounding.
Very important article. Great read!
May 31st, 2009 at 1:01 pm
The one important thing that extreme cropping tends to do, especially for environment and candid portraits as you have up there, is lose the context that the subject is in. For example, the top photo is a picture of a nice yacht on a lake. The cropped…the front of a boat. The vision of the original photo is lost and the viewer may become confused as to what they’re supposed to be looking at. Or in most cases, just passing the photo over.
Same for the second photo. The context of a market rife with selection and individuals shopping (even the “FREE…!” sign up on top of the image adds to the context) instead becomes a somewhat creepy photo of the stalker variety.
Not sure what to say about the Mustang shot, but it does have potential.
I do agree with the advice you give at the very end in that you should take multiple angles of the same shot. I usually take at least one portrait and one landscape, both centered and off centered for each. I also try to keep in mind that if I’m shooting environmental images, the context they are in is very important to pulling the viewer into the image. Otherwise, its just the front of a boat.
May 31st, 2009 at 4:23 pm
You’re right, Barrie. Cropping is important and is one of the toughest things to get right with an image.
What I really want to know … is how you managed to not get yelled at for snapping pics of women shopping for thongs? :)
May 31st, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Nice crop of the yacht…but unfortunately not the last two photos.
May 31st, 2009 at 8:29 pm
So I am curious, should you always constrain a crop to a specific size?
Sorry for perhaps a dumb question, I am such an amateur, but trying to learn.
My equipment sometimes doesn’t get me where I want to be (placement wise) and so – I zoom and crop, once I’m on the computer. Perhaps a bit too much though. Is there a guideline to follow in those kinds of circumstances.
May 31st, 2009 at 9:40 pm
@Valerie
You don’t have to crop to a specific size. I actually tend to keep the original aspect ratio but you don’t have to. You can order prints of about any image size, aspect ratio doesn’t matter.
I think, it’s important to crop and compose the image as good as possible while shooting and not in post production. What good are 12 megapixels in your camera if you have to crop half the image afterwards? Especially for printing that would be a real waste of pixels and details. If you have a zoom lens, zoom in on your subject and compose the shot. If you have a prime lens, get closer to your subject.
May 31st, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Yeah, sure… I’ve always heard about “cropping” in the camera, and I’m a strong subscriber to doing just that. BUT… carefully framing a shot too much, makes enlargements tricky, because photo shops inevitably cut off the edges and ruin the finished products. I have a hard time dealing with that problem.
June 1st, 2009 at 12:25 am
I really don’t like the examples of this article they are horrible, the pciture of the girls picking underwear seems to be from a voyeur gallery… thumbs down. Can you “crop” the article to make it better? just like photos lol
June 1st, 2009 at 2:05 am
If you’re going to rely on cropping to get a good final image, you need to be careful. The Mustang shot loses part of the roof and the bottom of the tyre from rotation, and so looks a little badly cropped.
Much better to take a few more seconds at the time (where possible – obviously in the second photo, the shopper may have moved on) and compose properly.
June 1st, 2009 at 4:37 am
I think cropping done of the yacht results in a worse picture. After the cropping, what is left is a blah picture.
As far as the second picture, I think Mikel is right on the mark. Furthermore, the diagonal whatever on the far right is made more distracting by the crop that was done. I think it should have been cropped out.
June 1st, 2009 at 6:16 am
Well first, you have to have a good picture to crop if cropping is to add anything to the photo. The girl of the photo shopping – who is going to hang that on their wall? A person of someone shopping… for underwear.
Second… you completely destroyed the yacht picture. It had a nicer ‘rule of thirds’ composition going on, and deleting the black shrubbery and water in favor of just a white yacht completely ruined the picture… nothing leads the eye into the photo like in the first, and it seems completely unbalanced.
Third… all you did with the first picture was change the angle. Also, there is a pink corner in the second that wasn’t in the first… that leads me to wonder what was going on. Instead of focusing on how to crop to show motion and angle… why not just shoot multiple shots like that before you upload the photos, that way you are focusing on what you get straight out of the camera and not how you can always edit a photo. That’s how pros work.
I understand the article on how cropping can help a photo, but feel the article could have been stronger and none of these photos lend such an example.
June 1st, 2009 at 8:22 am
Agree… this is a throw away article..
June 1st, 2009 at 9:15 am
(this comment was cropped before publishing, for brevity’s sake)
cropping: very important.
article: bad. not DPS standard.
June 1st, 2009 at 11:03 am
I like all of the before pictures better than the afters. :/
June 1st, 2009 at 10:05 pm
I think the article had a very good message to convey and a lot of people are getting hung up on the fact that it doesn’t work well for these photos. The fact is that, while you should try to get it right when you shoot it, sometimes something happens so quickly you need to snap to get the shot and may later discover there are unwanted elements. Now that our cameras have so many MP, you can crop it and still get a decent 4×6 or 8×10.
June 2nd, 2009 at 1:45 am
The lesson of this article is important, but the examples are terrible. The main reason is because they weren’t really interesting pictures to begin with. Darren posted a much better article on the subject a long time ago:
http://digital-photography-school.com/using-cropping-to-improve-photographs
The first picture in that article is still one of the best crops I’ve ever seen.
June 2nd, 2009 at 4:44 am
I think the more important lesson from the article (which is unstated) is to use the feedback in post-processing to learn how to “see” photographically when making the shot in the first place and thereby improve. Let me be more precise about this:
1. Learn your tendencies (and fix the bad ones).
We all have various tendencies (flaws perhaps) in shooting. If you find yourself consistently cropping the top or left of scenes (my tendency), then the point is to learn from this to move the subject higher and more leftward than what your “eye” suggests initially thus avoiding the need for “major surgery” on post-processing.
2. Work your subject.
If the subject is standing still, major surgery in post-processing can be avoided by making lots of shots from different angles, heights, etc. For instance, it probably would have sufficed to take several shots of the Mustang above from various angles and avoid the need to rotate in the first place. If a subject is worth shooting, it’s worth working with it to see what unexpected treasures it yields.
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I have to agree with some of the others – I think most of these shots were better before cropping. And you missed the lower-left corner on the last shot.
June 5th, 2009 at 2:39 am
I have to say, I agree with most of these comments. Cropping is hugely important in defining the shape, focus and weighting on your image – but these pictures do nothing to really illustrate this.
As mentioned already, the boat looks better in the original, as it balances a rule of 3rds well. The underwear photo has potential in the lines and rows drawing the eye into the picture – but this is broken up by the women standing there, and the cropped version looks pretty amateurish to me. Finally, the car image as a nice sense of diagonal division from top left to bottom right – this is ruined in the crop, and the car loses it’s roof, which again looks sloppy.
June 5th, 2009 at 2:46 am
Good . . . bad . . . strictly the eye of the beholder. Context people. Context. If I took the picture of the yacht because it is mine and I want to post a reference to it on a website . . . the cropped version is better than the original. It all depends what you are doing with it. You do not need to see the whole “thing” to understand it. That holds true for the mustang too. We all know that you should compose in camera. We all know that doesn’t always work. These instructions were meant for what to do “if.” The second photo . . . well, build the backstory and I’ll see.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:03 am
I am responding to the comment about aspect ratio. You can crop to whatever shape you want. Then by adjusting the image size and then the canvas size in photoshop, you can print the full image and then physically cut the print when it comes back. For example, say you have a square image that you want to print 8×8. In photoshop set the image size to 8×8 and then the canvas size to 8×10. Send the 8×10 to be printed. When it comes back from the printer you will have 2 inches of blank to cut off, but your image will be the size and shape you want.
June 5th, 2009 at 9:59 am
@Valerie
I run into the same challenges with cropping. After much trial and error, now when I do my cropping, I crop for the picture and without any regard to the resulting dimensions or aspect ratios. Then, once I’ve finished processing the photo, I do my best to fit the picture onto a 5×7, 8×10, 11×14, or whatever size it is I am wanting to print to.
Depending on how the picture came out best, I will either center the picture on a plain white or black layer or I will drop the photo into one of the corners leaving a white or black border along the one or both edges. For the centered variety, the printed picture comes out with its own faux mat. For the other variety, I use a scalpel and straight edge to physically cut away the unwanted borders. Of course, if you’re just emailing or posting to the web, it won’t make a bit of difference what your dimensions are.
Good luck!
June 5th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Are you out of your mind? 2 of the 3 look better before the crop. You chopped off part of the tire you douche.
June 6th, 2009 at 2:57 am
Hi Barrie,
I like the point your article is trying to make, but I think better examples could be used. I do think some of the other people who left comments are unnecessarily rude.
Also, I think it is important to stress the importance of retaining context of a crop, which I felt was lost in the boat shot. Unless of course you were wishing to stress the name of the boat.
Lastly, while cropping can be considered as a method to recompose a bad or so-so shot into a better photo, I think it is important to stress that cropping can provide a entirely new, good photo out of an originally good photo also. Some photos that I have seen have such great compositional variety that you could crop out multiple sections as great stand alones in addition to the original image.
June 6th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
I think the point made by John about having multiple angles on a good photo needs to be stressed. All too often, I see articles about rescuing bad photos. Part of the problem with that, is that for starters, they solutions often don’t do very much to make a bad photo better. Additionally, they don’t encourage you to accept that it is a bad photo, but also to stand back and figure out what you did wrong and how you can improve your photo technique so that you can get a better shot next time. Instead, slap a quick filter on it, maybe crop it a little bit, upload to your favorite Flickr groups and call it a day. Nothing learned this way unfortunately.
June 11th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
As a graphic designer I can appreciate the importance of a good crop, and the amount of ‘professional’ photos I have been supplied with over the years with bad crops, or ill thought out compostitions would honestly astound you. So, when I take shots, whether it be for myself or for clients I would prefer to leave a little extra land around my subject and crop it later as with the above, but only crop if it genuinely makes the image better.
The first image has far better crops within it than the one chosen, and unless I need a specific size, then I find that constraining the original aspect of the image helps it to become more believeable.
The second… well, sorry I think its dreadful, a landscape crop encompassing both women and removing the distracting feather boas would have been much better.
The mustang, again I find awkward, rotating the image is fine, but this is too much rotation, you should make sure the body line is perfectly horizontal not a few degrees out! I agree too that cutting off the tyre doesn’t help the image, and when cloning in Photoshop make sure you dont miss any bits like the red corner to the bottom left side.
If I was to say one thing it would be, duplicate the image before you do any work on it, you can at least start again if you make a mess of it.
June 16th, 2009 at 7:14 am
I do a lot of landscapes involving sea and sky. I am lucky enough to have a 12 Mpixel full format camera. If conditions are changing rapidly, or I haven’t much time, I get the horizon in the middle – as level as possible – and then play around with ‘rule of thirds’ crops when I get home. Sometimes the pictures actually look better with the horizon in the middle! I think there is such a thing as leaving a trail of visual clues as to how far away the horizon, or the subject, or whatever, actually is, also how high up you are in relation to your subject, etc, and the horizon height is relevant to this.
So far I have never been able to use ‘off the wall’ crops with wide-angle shots – just crop them so they are wide in relation to their height. Half the time, the reason for doing them is a fabulous sky, so you actually want lots of sky.
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