Hello, I'm Helen Bradley and welcome to this video tutorial. Today we're looking
at cropping in Lightroom.
There are three parts to this video tutorial.
First of all we're going to look at basic cropping and straightening in
Lightroom.
Then I'll show you how to flip between portrait and landscape cropping
using the default cropping ratios that Lightroom provides.
And finally we'll look at a number of crop overlays that can help you get
better results from your cropping.
So let's get started.
Cropping in Lightroom takes place in the Develop module and this is the Crop tool
To crop an image just simply click on it and you'll see this crop overlay
appear over the image.
You can drag inwards to crop your image,
and then to center the image inside the crop area you simply just pull with your
hand.
You can use the lines that are visible here to straighten your image.
To straighten the image I'm just going to move outside the crop area and rotate the
image until it's straight.
And when I'm happy with what I have I'll just double click to confirm that as
my crop.
Now at any stage in future I can come in and remove this crop.
I'll just click to display the crop overlay and you'll see here that
there's a Reset option.
If I click Reset the crop will be undone,
and the image reverts to how it looked when it was originally imported into
Lightroom.
While most people find it easy enough to crop an image in Lightroom
where you tend to run into problems is where you want an image that is the fixed size.
Let's select this image.
And I want to print it 5 x 7, so I'm going to select here the
5 x 7 option.
The problem is I don't want this to be in landscape orientation.
I want it to be a portrait image. I want to just take a slice out of this image.
The problem is that try as hard as you can you can't actually rotate this image
around to get it into portrait orientation
so it becomes an exercise in frustration unless you know what to do.
And what you need to do is to grab this handle up here
and drag it right down over here.
I'm just showing you at this stage what we're going to do. We're going to grab this handle
and drag it over here until the cropping rectangle changes its
orientation.
So let's do that now.
And you can see here that I'm flipping between
portrait and landscape.
And all I need to do is to let go when I actually have a portrait orientation
shape here. Now I can drag it into alignment and I can pull my image
into position.
I still have a 5 x 7 crop rectangle, so this is going to print
perfectly
on a 5 x 7 sheet of paper. There won't be anything left out of this
particular image.
Again, double click and I have my crop.
I have a fixed size portrait image
cropped from a landscape original.
Let's look now at the cropping overlays that Lightroom supplies us with. I'm
going to select a different image.
I'll click my Crop tool.
At the moment you're seeing the rule of thirds.
We use the rule of thirds to try and position something of interest in the
intersection between these lines, and a horizon might run along one of these lines.
But there are other overlays.
If I press the letter O on the keyboard I can flip between the available
overlays.
The first one we'll see is the Golden Ratio.
Then we have Diagonals,
Triangles
and the Golden Spiral.
We have a Grid and then we're back to the Rule of Thirds.
If you get one of these overlays such as the golden spiral and if you find that
the shape of the spiral isn't what you want it to be
you can press Shift and O.
And this will toggle between all available overlays.
You can see that now we're rotating the golden spiral around our
image.
And we can stop when we get it to the position that we want to use it in.
And you can just crop as you would any regular image.
These overlays are also available from the view menu.
Choose View and then Crop Guide Overlay. You can see you have the grid, the
rule of thirds, diagonal triangle,
golden ratio and golden spiral.
You'll see also that we were using the cycle grid overlay key, the letter O,
And the
cycle grid overlay orientation key
Shift + O.
Before we leave the crop tool let's just make mention of this lock.
At the moment I'm forced into cropping my image to the same aspect ratio as
the original was. I can't pull on any of these handles to make it a different aspect
ratio.
If I click the lock tool to unlock it then I have freedom.
I can make the image any shape that I want it to be.
I still have all my cropping options available to me,
but I'm not being forced to crop the image to the exact same ratio as the
original was.
So there you have some of the basics of using the crop tool in Lightroom.
I'm Helen Bradley, thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.
You can find more of my work at my website projectwoman.com and I also
post regularly in post-production at digitalphotographyschool.com.