And Lightroom has different tools to fit your different needs. Crop your imageĪs I mentioned at the beginning, there are many reasons why you would like to crop your image. You’ll also notice that your image now has an outer frame with handles on the corners and halfway along each of the sides. Once the tool is activated, you’ll see the adjustment panels for it. Alternatively, you can enable it using the keyboard by pressing the R key. The Crop tool is the first one from the left.

On the right side, just below the Histogram, you have the tools strip. Once your image is in the Library, you can move to the Develop module. (See this guide for how to crop a picture into a circle – something Lightroom cannot do.) This guide will take you through everything you need to know about how to crop in Lightroom. In sum, you can see that there are many situations in which using the Crop and Straighten tool in Lightroom might come in handy. Or maybe you want to change the orientation from landscape to portrait, or vice versa. You can also crop to eliminate an unwanted element towards the edge of the corner. In those cases, cropping your image to get closer to your subject or position the elements according to a specific composition is common practice. Maybe you didn’t have a long enough focal length, or you just want to arrange the elements in a better way. This is because stretching the image to cover those areas again can make it lose quality.Ī common reason to crop an image is to recompose the framing. To fix this, the most appropriate action is to crop the image a bit smaller. When you rotate your photo to straighten the lines in it, you’ll leave some areas in the corner without any pixels. Both tools are actually in the same panel in Lightroom because they’re so often used together. If you’re going to print, you need your photo to be an adequate size for the paper format, etc.Īnother cause for cropping is having to straighten the horizon on your photograph. When you’re going to post or print a photo, you need to fit your image to the measurements or aspect ratio requested.įor example, to upload to Instagram you need to optimize your photos to fit any of their aspect ratios. One of the most common reasons is to fit a specific format.

So, back to the reasons why you would want to crop. You might want to do this for a number of reasons but you should be aware that you’ll be losing pixels in the process.įortunately, Lightroom creates a new version of your photo and this way you’ll always have your original untouched.

Lightroom cc tutorials 2021