Some Really Handy Cropping Tips

Happy Friday, everybody! Here’s one from the “best of” collection — it’s some really handy tips cropping tips, sent in by one of our readers/viewers (I love it when readers send in awesome tips — thank you!), and I wanted to share them with you here to start your Friday off right. Here we go:

TIP #1: When you have the crop tool in place, if you need to straighten the image, just hold the Command-Key (Windows: Ctrl-key) and your cursor temporarily changes to the Ruler tool, so you can drag it out along any straight area and it will straighten your image.

TIP #2: If you’re resizing the crop box by dragging one side of the crop boundary and maintaining the ratio – it will move the center of the crop box the direction you’re dragging… eg. the visual center changes (as seen above) – which you might want – but it you don’t… (see next image)

…if you hold the Option key (Windows: the Alt key) while doing this, it will keep the center of the crop box in the same place…and change the periphery while maintaining the visual center point.

TIP #3:  If you think it would be nice if they had a cross hair in the center of the crop as part of the overlay, try this: Go under the View menu, to Loupe Overlay; choose Grid, and choose “Show.” Now hold the Command key (Windows: Ctrl-key) to make the grid size control visible at the top center of the preview area then drag the Overlay Grid all the way over to the biggest size and you end up with± a cross hair in the center like you see here.

Hope you found that helpful. 🙂

Have a great weekend everybody, and I hope to see you back here on Monday.

Best,

-Scott

P.S. Lightroomers in Boston or Philly — I’m there next month with my full-day Lightroom seminar – come on out and spend the day with me learning Lightroom. Just $99 for the full day (included a detailed workbook), and it’s 100% money back guaranteed if you don’t absolutely super dig it (because we know you will absolutely super dig it. Guaranteed!). 🙂