Using crop tool to improve composition

Often, it is not possible to perfectly compose the photo at the moment of shooting. This is particularly true for action photography, but it is quite common in most real-life situations when we don’t have total control of the model, the background and/or have limited time to take the shot.

Post-processing can dramatically improve a photo, and one adjustment that has the highest impact is cropping. Cropping affects composition, which is the most fundamental element of a picture. It allows us to emphasize the subject and remove non-essential or distracting parts. In Adobe Lightroom, the crop tool located at the very top of tool panel in the “Develop” module. This is not a coincidence. The tools are laid out in the order of the recommended (read: common) post-processing workflow, where the most important, high-impact adjustments are made first.

Recently, I have been taking increasingly more pictures with my iPhone. Before sharing them online, I often make some rough adjustments using the editing mode of the built-in Photos app. Cropping is usually one of them. Here is what I typically do to improve composition:

1. Straighten horizon.
2. Cut off unnecessary/distracting elements that do not contribute to the story I am trying to tell in the picture. When in doubt – crop tighter.
3. Try to use “the rule of thirds” (position the mail element of the picture at the intersection of imaginary vertical and horizontal lines that divide the width and the height of the picture into thirds). for example, in the image above, the face of the fisherman is positioned 1/3 of the frame height from the top of the frame and 1/3 of the frame width from the right side.
4. Crop the image so that any diagonal lines intersect a corner of the photo – it helps leading the viewer’s eyes into the frame. Again, in the image above, the strings lead from the bottom left corner of the frame towards the middle. Also, the diagonal planks on the hull of the boat lead from the bottom right corner.

Note: It is a good idea to keep these points in mind during the shoot itself to avoid excessive cropping in post-processing, which reduces the number of pixels (i.e. resolution) in the final photo.

Recently, I was taking headshots of the faculty members of my daughter’s dance school for their website, and looked into various ways of cropping the portraits. One rule of thumb for cropping a headshot is that cutting off the top of the model’s head makes the portrait more appealing. It may seem counter-intuitive, but this kind of close crop emphasizes the person’s eyes and make her/him appear engaged with the viewer.