Reader Question: Can You Create Presets for Cropping?
Hi Gang, and happy Friday!
Last week when I posted here about my new Lightroom CC Killer Tips online class, one of my readers, Stephanie Bunhc, asked “Can you create presets for cropping?” The answer is: “…you sure can!” Here’s how:
STEP ONE: Open an image, and then click on the Crop Tool (BTW: one of my all-time favorite keyboard shortcuts in Lightroom is just to press the letter ‘r’ which jumps you directly to the Develop Module [no matter where you’re at] and activates the Crop tool). Now, to the left of the lock icon; click and hold where it says “As Shot” and a pop-up menu will appear with a list of preset cropping sizes that come with Lightroom. To create your own, choose “Enter Custom” from the bottom of the menu (as shown here).
STEP TWO: That brings up the “Enter Custom Aspect Ratio” dialog box; just enter the aspect ratio you want (as shown here) and click OK. In this case, I put in 2.39 which gives you a cinematic-style wide screen crop.
STEP THREE: Now, that cropping preset you just created will appear in the pop-down menu, at the bottom of menu below Enter Custom (as seen here). There ya go, Stephanie. 🙂
Hope you all found that helpful. 🙂
Best,
-Scott
Nice tip, but REALLY want a way to have LR go right into a certain crop ratio (16:9 in my case) every time I hit the R key. Drives me nuts that I have to reset back to 16:9 from my 4:3 photo default every time.
Even better would be a (customizable) shortcut that we could tap for a specific crop size, rather than tapping R and then having to mouse through sizing options.
What I am missing since the first version of Lightroom is cropping to a fixed pixel size, e.g. 1920×1080.
That happens on export, and you can save an export preset with fixed dimensions.
I wish that LR would have a second keyboard shortcut to auto straighten after hitting r.
Wonder which ‘preset’ Stephanie was referring to? Doesn’t preset also refer to the ones you can established in the left panel and can be applied during import?
Not sure that would work for cropping as you can’t really specify what part of the image should be left after cropping. That needs to be done manually. So while you can save the crop dimensions, you can’t save the size and location.
It’s all about the work flow and the number of button pushes. Coming into the develop module right after importing with the crop already set is an advantage. The re-positioning was the next step if done manual from the start anyway. You can do an autosync of all photos and selecting the proper crop but IMO that’s more of a workaround and requires unnecessary keystrokes that can be avoided with the ability to have the crop established in a preset that is applied automatically upon import.
Another thing that would be helpful would be the ability to set a default crop dimension in LR vs always having to go in and select the one you want.
The question was can a crop be saved as a preset.. it seems not. And obviously if you could your photos would have been taken to take advantage of it. As it is it has to be done each time you import for one then that pasted in library to all the others.. which is a shame. A preset would be better.