Tips & Tricks for Cropping Images & Photos

Why Do You Need to Crop Images?

In a perfect world, every photo turns out perfectly. Images are always lined up in a beautiful, artistic way, everyone’s eyes are open, and there is never an errant stranger walking in the background or powerline crossing through your shot. However, things rarely turn out that way; instead of a perfect image, people are out of focus, or someone is pulling a face. If you’re trying to get multiple children to smile in a picture, you’ll be lucky if they’re all facing the same direction.

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Cropping can improve and balance the composition of your photos. You’ll be able to cut out a garbage can, a stranger sneezing, or a dump truck that parked just as you were taking the picture. This will allow you to keep the focus on your subject, even if your subject is just a tree. You’ll be able to cut out the crowd and focus on a couple sharing their first kiss at their wedding. Cropping can help to frame your subject, lead the viewer’s eyes where you want them to go, and keep out the background noise.

An interesting crop can also allow you to present a common object in an uncommon fashion. Perhaps you’ve noticed that a small switch in a café resembles a face or would like to highlight the details of a flower from a new angle. Cropping allows you to change how others might see an object or person, by calling attention to a new angle. When you crop images, you can change the focus from the whole object to a single part, allowing details that might be otherwise missed to shine.

When you’re reviewing your photos after a shoot, think about the story you want your images to tell. Using a cropping tool to remove distractions, emphasize details, and get creative with your composition. You can even crop a picture in Microsoft Office to make your documents and presentations really stand out.

Tips for Cropping Images

Each photographer has a different goal in mind when they take pictures. There are no hard and fast rules that will guarantee perfection every time, and these tips may not be applicable to a given image. However, they can act as suggestions to help you improve your photos.

Use the rule of thirds

When you’re looking at your picture, pretend that it’s divided into thirds, either horizontally or vertically. Crop your image so that your subject is within one of third of the photo, rather than perfectly centered. It helps to draw the viewer’s eye into the image and allows more emphasis to be placed on the subject.

Let your photo tell a story

If you’re taking a photo that depicts dog jumping to catch a frisbee and you crop out the frisbee, you’ll still have a dynamic image, but it won’t tell the whole story. Consider what message you’re trying to share and make sure that you can still tell your story with pictures, even after you’ve cropped some of it away.

Remove unnecessary details and distractions

You’re taking a picture of a deer walking through the early morning mist and everything in your shot in is lining up perfectly. Except the deer is walking near a construction site and there’s a bulldozer in your frame. By cropping out that bulldozer, you can focus the attention on your subject. Similarly, if you’re trying to capture your son blowing out his birthday candles, and on the far right of the frame is a party guest having a meltdown, you can use a cropping tool to keep the focus on your child. If there’s something in your photo that’s pulling focus, you can use a cropping tool to remove it.

Follow leading lines

Feel free to crop your photos for maximum visual impact. One way to do this is by following leading lines, which are lines that lead a viewer’s eye from one part of the image to another. They may start at the bottom and guide the eye upward, or from the foreground to the background. An example might be the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge drawing the eye to the center of the bridge. Think of the line created by a river winding through a valley to a stunning mountain range or a road leading to the top of a hill. Leading lines are everywhere and can be used to your advantage when deciding to crop your images.

Another tip is to make sure you don’t crop out the horizon. A great idea is to keep the line of the horizon on one of the two horizontal lines on a rule of thirds grid, in order to keep the composition balanced.

Take care when cropping images of people

Other people can be incredible, dynamic subjects for photographers. However, there are a few tricks for cropping images of people:

• Avoid cropping limbs at the joint; it can look like an awkward amputation, rather than a purposeful choice.
• Don’t give your subject an awkward haircut. Keep the crop away from their hairline.
• If you’re shooting a series of pictures, like portraits for a high school senior, keep the crop consistent so that the images have a uniform look.
• Let your subjects look their best. Use the crop tool for cosmetic purposes if someone has a stain on their shirt or mud on their shoes, just don’t cut them off at the ankles.

Try a new shape

If you’re doing graphic design work, there are tools available that allow you to crop pictures into shapes that might work for your purposes. Microsoft Office allows you to use picture tools to crop a picture to fit in a shape in Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Excel. While a rectangle is almost always a good choice, sometimes you really need your image cropped to a circle, heart, or other creative shape.

Learning how to effectively crop your images will improve your photography. You’ll become better at identifying interesting subjects and emphasizing what makes them unique. When you study your raw photographs and make conscious decisions about what to crop away, your ability to create more deliberate images with strong composition will improve.