Guidelines for Cropping Photos

Control Field of View

Cropping photos is the fastest edit you can make and yields high reward for little effort

When displaying your photographs, you have many choices about the framing of the image:

• How much of the original image to show
• The aspect ratio (width x height) of the displayed image
  
• How large the image displays.

Cropping photos is the means to achieve the first two criteria and directly impacts the maximum size of the display. Let's tackle each of these in order.

Selecting How Much of the Original Image to Show

Several conditions may cause you to want to reduce the amount of the original image to show.

Edge Distractions

As much care as you take in composing pictures in the field, you may not always see distracting information at the edges of photos until you view them on-screen back at home.

Consider the Gdynia boat image (see Subject Selection and Rule of Thirds). The boats and dock at the left edge are not only distracting, but they constrain the sense of expansive water that balances the image.

Roll your mouse over the image above to see a simple crop that removes the distractions, while still retaining the rule-of-thirds positioning of the boat's bow.

Then, look at the cropped image below to see how the image looks cleaner without the distant distractions.

Distant Subject

It may be that you want to get closer to your subject, but you can't move physically closer and you don't have a long enough lens. By cropping photos you make your subject occupy a larger proportion of the final frame, just as if you had been closer in the first place.

Uninteresting Subject

When reviewing your pictures after the fact, you may find that some compositions are not as compelling as you thought when out in the field. But, if you think in terms of cropping photos, you may see a smaller, more compelling image within the frame.

An Extreme Example (and a Bit of What Not to Do)

An extreme (yes, very extreme) example of these last two points is found in the Hawaiian Dancer of the first weekly photography composition.

The original image, from which Hawaiian Dancer was cropped, was interesting in its own right because it told a story about the dance. But, the busy background makes it hard for the viewer's eyes to rest on the subject, reducing the overall interest of the image.

On the other hand, the dancer's face has poise and strong character, and I wish that I could have filled the frame with her profile. Through the "magic" of cropping (larger rectangle when rolling your mouse over the image above), I was able to come up with the compelling composition, below. Compare its impact with the busy original image, above.

Now, here is the part about "what not to do."

The original image was about 4300 pixels wide, good enough for a good-size poster print. The cropped image at right was only 800 pixels wide before reducing for this web page - you could not make a very large print from this, although it works well for a web page or an electronic picture frame.

Except for video display, you cannot often get away with such an extreme crop. But, the example does illustrate the multiple compositional possibilities to be found within a single frame.

There is one more case for an extreme crop, which is to extract something from an image for an icon. In this case, I used her lips on the Weekly Digital Photography Composition page as index image, or icon.

With creative cropping of photos, three very different images, with very different stories, have been achieved from one photographic exposure.

Selecting the Right Proportions

Now, you've read why to crop your pictures and learned how cropping can improve your images. The next step is to crop them to the right proportion, the or aspect ratio, which can be governed by your artistic sense or by the medium in which you will display your work. Click here to learn about aspect ratio.