Cropping

[photobum]

I haven't gotten too deep into PP yet, but I have a question about cropping. I am currently using iPhoto until I can upgrade, and was wondering if there is a way to crop photos without reducing the image quality (ie sharpness of the image)?

[JFSanders]

Only by not having the program automatically resize the image after cropping. Understand that when you crop, you are physically removing image information and if you make the cropped image fill the same space as the original image it will be pixelated unless the original is very large to begin with and the crop is minimal. So if you have a image that would be 8x10 in its native size and you crop 2 inches all around and then make the image fit into a 8x10 print it will be fuzzy/pixelated.

Jim

[photobum]

So does that mean that any cropping will reduce the image quality?

[JFSanders]

That depends upon what the original resolution of the image was and what your final output size is in relation to the original resolution.

Think of an image like a chess board. Each square is a pixel and if you cut off pixels around the image and don't stretch the remaining pixels apart to make the board the same size as it was before then no it won't effect image quality. But if you do stretch the remaining pixels then the image editor has to fill in the gaps created by the stretching with interpolated (means educated guessing) information or your image would look like a window screen.

Jim