Image Cropping Tips

original Article by KSdigital

     Cropping an image is just a simple task. You just click the crop tool in the image editing software and then apply it to your image. That's it? Not quite. Proper image cropping is one of the most important process in photo editing. In fact, it is the first procedure performed by most photo artists in the image editing workflow.

     Let's investigate a sample image. In the image below, there are three objects that can be considered as distractions to the real subject of the photo. First is the hair on the right portion of the image. The second and third are the arm and flowers at the left portion of the image.

     We will now apply image cropping to this photo and see how the process affects the resulting image.

     Look at the result. The photo is more focused on the real subject. This is how important image cropping is. If done properly it can give you magnificent photos.

     Let's try another example. How do you crop the image below? Any ideas? The image below has two primary subjects. The girl holding the flower on the left and the girl holding a piece of paper on the right. You might say, "how about the man at the center?". Well, the image of the man is too blurry to become a subject so he's out of the picture. Let's focus on the two girls and try a first attempt to crop the image.

Now, let's examine the result.

     The resulting image doesn't look that good either. Both girls still seem to be far apart from each other and the image of the man at the center still poses a distraction to the photo. Let's do a second attempt to crop the image.

     Now, the photos look more focused and they look good compared to our first cropped image.

     You see, cropping an image is really not that simple. You still have to do some "photo investigaton" in order to produce good results. Don't stop until you get the perfect photo. Goodluck!