How much do you crop

[nick_gray]

I agree with the others about cropping, you've really got to just try it, until you are happy with the results. You might even find that you can get a couple of images out of the one photo.

The other thing that I do now as part of my workflow is resize my images to be 800px wide (or tall), so my friends and family can see them comfortably on their computer screen. So I've set my crop tool up to be 800px wide by 533px high. Now when I drag the crop box onto my image, I can move the box around and drag the corners to make the crop box bigger or smaller until I'm happy with where it's going to crop, I then double click and I've got my 800px wide image (I'm not sure what editing software you have, I'm using Photoshop CS5, but I think you can do something similar if you have Photoshop Elements - I've just checked and yes you can http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eaUBrEK1_w).

With your image you might also want to try reducing the brightness and increase the saturation, to bring out the colours in the tail feathers and make the chicks stand out a bit more (I hadn't noticed them on the small image).

Regards

Nick

[markgozz]

Nick

Thanks for your response and that’s very interesting about setting up your crop tool to a specific size because I was going to ask about the pros and cons of the finished proportions of an image . I find myself cropping to fit my monitor more than fitting the image , oh and by the way I use CS2 . Thanks for the advice on tweaking the brightness and sats ,I've had a quick go and will post the new image . Sorry about the image size I still haven’t work out how to make them click-able I think I'm being a bit thick , but if you right click the image then left click view image you will get the full size version .

Mark



Got it click away


PS
Nick . I just had a look at your gallery and was interested in what you were saying about the blurring on a couple of your shots , now I dont know for sure but I think your using the canon 100mm macro which is probably one of the best macros you can get but if you push the f stop all the way out to f/32 you will loose a bit of quality but the spider at f/5.7 is spot on .

[nick_gray]

Hi Mark,

Well done on making your image clickable, it's not easy is it?. I think your photo looks much better now, but it doesn't matter what I think, it just matters whether you are happy with it.

I've just had a look on my old laptop that has CS2 on and you can set the dimensions of the crop, as per CS5. Click the crop tool, in the menu you can enter the dimensions. As I said earlier I use 800px by 533px, to keep the same dimension that my 500d produces. If you want to switch between a landscape crop and a portrait crop, click the bi-directional arrow between the width and height settings. And just keep playing :-)

You are right I do have the 100mm macro and it is a lovely lens. I struggled with it to start with, but it was me being an idiot and thanks to the people on here I went out and had a play and a test, and I think I'm now getting the hang of it.

Cheers

Nick

[rbarry]

"As I said earlier I use 800px by 533px, to keep the same dimension that my 500d produces."

Hi Nick,

I assume your choice of crop size is relative to the aspect ratio that your Canon 500d captures images, rather than a definitive crop size for post processing of any given image.

The amount of cropping that size produces depends on the pixel size of the original image, so for those with say a 4mp image the crop will be far less than for that of an image captured at 15mp.

I assume your method maintains the aspect ratio of the crop, rather than constraining every crop to 800 x 533 in size. I think you use the crop box set to that size initially, and then drag the crop box corners to suit the crop size you want. To maintain the aspect ratio you would only drag the corners and obviously not the crop nodes in the centre of the four sides of the bounding box.

I only make this point so that others are aware that the crop size you are suggesting is a ratio of your image sensor and as such retains the aspect ratio, rather than the image pixel size of the final crop. Sensors from other camera body manufacturers will be different, so they will have to use a different initial dimension to maintain the correct aspect ratio of their image sensor.

Have I correctly understood your method?

All the best,

Rick.

[nick_gray]

Hi Rick,

I think you are correct in your assumption. As you say, my crop box is in relation to the aspect ratio of my 500d image sensor*. I don't start with a crop box of a specific dimension. Once I've set the dimensions in the crop menu, I just click and drag across my image, and shunt and move the crop box around until I'm happy and then double click. But I always end up with a cropped image that is 800px wide by 533px tall, no matter how much I move the box or drag the crop box corners.

*The 533px is a bit of an odd looking number, but I came to it by taking an image from my camera and resizing the whole image so that the longest side was 800px, I clicked the maintain aspect ratio box and then made a note of the other dimension, which was 533px.

I don't know if this is the correct way of doing these things, but it seems to work for me.

I've now used my resizing method with an image from my Wife's Lumix and an image from my Daughter's CoolPix and the dimensions for both of their cameras should be 800px x 600px.

I just conducted a little experiment. I've just overlaid a 800px x 533px crop over a 800px x 600px crop of the same image (one from my Daughter's camera) reduced the transparency of one layer, and can see that there is quite a difference between the two crops. So you are absolutely correct in that the aspect ratio of the crop/resizing is dependant on the image sensor size.

Thanks for bringing it to my attention (and making my head hurt) :-)

Regards

Nick

EDIT: OK, I've just redone my experiment, but set two vertical guides to crop to, to make sure I'm cropping the same thing with both crop sizes. I pasted both the 800x600 and the 800x533 onto different layers, changed the opacity of the top layer and the images sit perfectly one over the top of the other with no distortion. So now I'm a bit confused.

[markgozz]

Nick

Just had a quick play with the crop tool and I'm now scratching my head a bit . The width and height fields set the size of the crop in inches or cm but not px , you can then size your crop by dragging the crop tool and it will maintain the ratio of 800in x 600in or 8in x 6in it doesn't matter because they are both the same . Once cropped you can view the image size from the drop down menu ( Image ) and it will show you the size in inches and pixels but the ratio will always be 8 units x 6 units . Or have I got it totally wrong .

Mark

[nick_gray]

I clicked on the crop tool, a width and height box appears underneath the main menu (see my image below), here's where I typed 800 px and 533 px into the boxes, before then dragging the crop tool over my image:



And then my final image is always 800 pixels wide.

Cheers

Nick

[markgozz]

Yes your right just tried it and the ratio is the same with 800px x 600px as it is with 800in x 600in , I just typed 800 x 600 and then photoshop put in the inches bit by its self .The only difference that I can see is the overall file size , with the 800 pixels set the file size is about 1.5 MB and with the 8 inches set the file size is about 7.5 MB .

[nick_gray]

Hi Mark,

Does it make sense what I'm doing now? or more importantly how you want it?

Make sure you type in the 'px' after the 800 and 600, when you are entering it into the set crop width box, else I think PS will change it by default to inches.

I'm not sure why you would want to crop your image to 800 inches by 600 inches that's something like 67 by 50 feet!! :-) If you mean 8 inches by 6 inches* that would give you a cropped image size of approximately 3584 px by 2688 px (based on my set up) so it is to be expected that the filesize would be nearly 5 times larger than an 800 px by 600 px image as there is nearly 5 times the amount of information in the file.

*Try to avoid resizing images using inches or cms, particularly if you are mainly going to be displaying your images on your screen. An inch/cm is a different physical size on different devices. For example, a 1 inch image on your screen won't necessarily print out at 1 inch because of different resolutions on your screen versus your printer. And this is where I'm going to leave this bit, before I start to confuse us both with dpi and ppi etc.

I hope this helps, rather than confuse further.

Regards

Nick

[markgozz]

To late my head just popped .

As a rule I only use the crop tool free hand ( no pixels or inches set at all ) , the only reason I was setting it today was to get the ratio of 8 x 6 or 800 x 600 .

I think I need a drink .