Lightroom Tips

Friday Tip – Cropping the cool way

Time for the Friday tip again. Scroll down to the next paragraph to read it. Keep reading here if you live anywhere near the Philadelphia area and can get some time off next Tuesday morning (June 3). If so, I’ll be teaching a free class on Photoshop CS3 sponsored by Adobe and CDW. There’s actually some other Creative Suite stuff being taught during the day but my part is in the morning. Anyway, it is indeed free and all you have to do is sign up here.

Now for the tip. I named this post, Cropping the Cool Way because there’s a really neat tip for cropping. Try this. Next time you’re going to crop a photo, you’ll obviously go into Crop mode (just press the R key). Then you drag around the handles to get your crop just right. One of the problems is that you still see the non-cropped areas of your photo (albeit in a darkened state) and some people find that distracting. If you’re among the distracted type try pressing the L key twice (one for Lights Dim mode and once for Lights Out mode). This blacks everything but the photo and the crop handles. This way you can crop in a totally black area and you’re always seeing exactly what your photo will look like after the crop. Take care and if you do stop by the event in Philly on Tuesday make sure you come up and say hi tell me how much you like the Lightroom blog/podcast 😉

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