Crop your photos for more impactful images

Posted on February 22, 2018 by Admin under Photography, Tips

Do you crop your photos? Taking or creating, a great photo is more than just clicking the shutter or pressing a button.

Even with phone snaps, selfies and Instagram you now have lots of options to be more creative with how your finished images look. Filters are the most common way of changing an image, but another effective way is cropping your image.

CROPPING YOUR PHOTOS

Polaroid style photo frame

Cropping your photo isn’t just a way of getting rid of unwanted detail, it is a creative tool to help you add emphasis to elements in an image and make it more powerful. Or in other words framing your image.

Every time I do a photoshoot, I download my images into Lightroom, review them and choose the ones I think look best artistically, or that show the best event coverage. I do any necessary colour and sharpening to the images to create the effect/s that I want. I also look carefully at each image to see if I think it needs cropping.

White or negative space

When I do this, I look at the white or negative space around the image, is the subject (a portrait or something at an event) too small in the photo and would they benefit from being bigger in the final photo? Or at an event, is there part of a person on the edge of the photo that makes it look really ugly, or that has no relevance to the topic and would be better gone?

Lightroom

Lightroom allows you to make flexible crops to an image and reset it if it doesn’t work the way you want. You can also create virtual copies so you can try different crops (and effects) on the same image. There are lots of editing that suit any budget, check out what each one can.

Examples

A TIGHT CROP

Image showing how cropping improves a photo

Here’s an example from a recent shoot I did for a play at Questors Theatre in Ealing. The pic shows how the photo looked in Lightroom and the crop tool. As you can see I’ve cropped it quite tightly, for several reasons. Firstly to get rid of the feet on the right hand side of the image. Secondly to get rid of a lot of the empty room. Because the shot is a rehearsal shot of a play, I wanted to focus the attention on the action happening in the main part of the image. The images from the shoot went up on the promotional board outside the theatre, so visitors want to see the play, not the room behind the actors.

Here’s the final cropped image. It’s much more intimate (like in a restaurant) and there are no distractions from unimportant elements.

I also look at things like the horizon (if it’s a landscape shot) and using the crop tool in Lightroom I can line that up with the cropping grid.

The finished crop

A LIGHTER CROP

Crop of a portrait for Dr John Rowe, copywriter and proofreader

Here’s another example, this time from a recent portrait session with Dr John Rowe from Dr John Proofreading & Copywriting.

I wasn’t quite as tight with the crop this time as the image didn’t need that, there was just a bit too much space at the top and the sides of the image.

With this crop, the image looks balanced and the viewer’s eye follows easily around the image.

Final crop of a portrait for Dr John Rowe, copywriter and proofreader

CHANGE THE FORMAT

Changing the format is a good crop technique

You can also change the format of an image. You may have taken the photo as a landscape, but there is too much space around your subject. Cropping it in a vertical format gets rid of the extra space and makes your subject more important.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN FORMAT

You may have an image that you really like, but that doesn’t look right in either landscape or portrait format. Choose the format yourself by rotating the crop tool. This techniques allows you to ‘save’ a photo that you really like and want to use, but that won’t work in any other way.

In the following image I loved how the acrobat was moving and how the cloth and the shadows were positioned. However, I didn’t like the fact that the top of the paper roll was showing at the top. I also didn’t like the shadow at the bottom, so I rotated the crop tool to get the shot I wanted. Going tighter would have cut too much of the shadow of her leg out of the image. I’ve positioned it right on the edge of the picture instead.