[Elements of Post Processing] Elements of Cropping

[[Geoff Slocock]]

Often one will choose portrait or landscape for your shot and form an opinion at the time of shooting, as to whether you would be advised to crop parts of the image out, later. Sometimes you will not be able to get close enough for the subject or there will be unsightly parts that you will want to crop out. Of course, also back at home you can easily find that you did not choose the best position from which to shoot and that you can "correct" that.

There are several composition devices and aspects that can come into play too; and not just when it comes to cropping. You might for example feel that changing the contrast and brightness will make a difference to how you will want to crop the picture. With experience behind you can home in quite quickly on all of the issues with a shot that you take.

All post processing editors give you a sort of preview that greys out the temporarily deselected parts of a proposed crop. You experiment with this, weigh up the various pros and cons and make your choice.

In this instance I have set up guidelines to help me to choose some rule of thirds positions. This crop would indeed involve me in wanting different levels of contrast and brightness... no one aspect of processing is ever independent of others, it seems.