Digital Cropping

Gone are the days of carefully cutting our photos into heart and star shapes, an era many of us look back on and cringe. Replacing this fad are succinct square and rectangular photos—shapes that are truly timeless and classic. Today’s digital age makes cropping and resizing photos a breeze, but there are a few things you should consider as you make these edits to your digital photos.

Work on a copy
First, always, always save a copy of your digital image before you make any edits. Edit the image only on the copy, never on the original. While your photo may work great in a closely cropped 4”x4” size for this particular project, you may want more of the image available the next time you use it.

Consider what’s relevant
“I never crop out something I might want later,” designer Sara Naumann says. Sara only removes the background in a photo if it is not relevant to the project she’s working on and if it isn’t striking. While Sara would keep the background of a photo with colorful fall leaves or beautiful spring flowers, she would remove distracting or unappealing elements.

Think of cropping as cutting away unnecessary or unwanted portions of an image to help focus the viewer’s eye and tell a story. Before you crop a photo, you should take a careful look at the background in the picture. Ask yourself if the surroundings are important to the story you’re trying to tell in your layout. Is your layout focused on the place the photo was taken or another specific element?

The Rule of Thirds
When cropping your photo, you should also keep in mind the Rule of Thirds. Use guides or visually divide the photo into thirds both horizontally and vertically. Some say the four points where the lines intersect in the center of the photo are where important elements should lie. For example, if you’re cropping in closely on a subject, the eyes of a person should lie on one of the third lines because it helps you to see the image as a whole. Allowing the subject of your photo to reside in the left or right third also leaves room for an appealing or fun background in the photo.

Crop, don’t amputate
As you’re cropping a photo to fill a frame, be careful of exactly how you’re cropping off certain portions. While it’s okay to crop off the hand or legs of a subject, be sure it’s easy for the mind to imagine them there. “I think it depends on what your eye is willing to finish naturally and what it’s not,” explains designer Susan Cobb. Susan recommends avoiding cropping at joints, but rather leaving a small portion of a hand or leg in the photo to keep it from looking awkward or incomplete.

Don’t zoom too much
While it’s tempting to zoom in tightly on a face or item in a photo, enlarging a small portion to create a large picture is a bad idea. Keep in mind that as you crop, you’re deleting pixels from an image. Enlarging a small cropped portion of an image can result in a very blurry end result. In this case, try proportionally enlarging the image as a whole before cropping.

The ability to crop and enlarge photos digitally has made the art of scrapbooking much, much easier for many. Sticking to these few guidelines should help you get optimal results with your photos—happy cropping!