Of course, these details can add a sense of texture, context, and emotion to a scene. Crop to focus your viewer’s attention on the subjectĪs I go through my photos in Lightroom I often find that in addition to my main subject I have included other elements in the frame that might distract the viewers or detract from the impact of the subject. However, there are a few guidelines that are likely to improve your images in most scenarios. When deciding what to crop out of your images there’s no hard-and-fast rule that will guarantee perfection every time. All this goes to illustrate my point that no matter what camera you use, you probably have plenty of room to crop your images if you really want to do so. The actual dimensions of the cropped image are 1982 x 1321 pixels which means it’s plenty large enough to make a 4×6″ print at 300dpi. The original, I assure you, did not look like this at all. The 24-megapixel sensor on a D7100 allows for a huge amount of cropping, especially for a site like dPS which requires pictures to have a maximum dimension of 750 pixels. You might be wondering how I got close enough to take this picture with just a 50mm lens, but in truth I was quite far away and just cropped the image.
As an example, here’s a picture of a rabbit that I shot with a 50mm lens on my Nikon D7100. But know that you also have a massive amount of wiggle room to crop them down afterward and you needn’t worry about losing quality.
I know all this might seem a bit off the beaten path when it comes to learning how to crop, but the moral of the story is that you should, of course, do whatever you can to get your pictures composed in camera. Of course, there are always exceptions to this, and some sites might want your pictures to be larger than 2048 pixels, but if you’re posting them on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, or other popular sites that size is more than big enough.
This means that of the pixels available to you from a 20-megapixel camera, you could trim away 16 million of them (almost 80 percent!) and still get a sharp picture for sharing online. A good rule of thumb for that is to keep the maximum dimension, either width or height, to no more than 2048 pixels. There’s also the issue of posting and sharing your pictures online. Suffice it to say, unless you are turning your pictures into wall-sized posters there is clearly a lot of room within those megapixels to crop to your heart’s content. A 200 dpi print at that size contains about 1 million pixels or five percent of what the 20-megapixel camera has to offer. This means you could take an uncropped image from a 20-megapixel camera and print a pristine picture 27 inches wide! If you’re making standard 4×6″ prints it’s even better. If you’re going to print your photos it’s a good idea to have them be at least 200 dpi or dots per inch. Mobile phones are usually about 12, and some ultra-expensive DSLRs are 36, but I’m going to use 20 megapixels as a nice round baseline here.
Most modern digital cameras have anywhere from 16-24 megapixels. The math of cropping and why it’s okay to do itīefore getting too deep into the art of cropping it’s important to know what your goals are for your photography and look at the math behind those megapixels. Sometimes all it takes to give your pictures the added punch you’re looking for is a few clicks of the humble crop tool. Things like exposure, contrast, color saturation, black-and-white conversion, and even adding and removing elements can all be done with the magic of Lightroom and Photoshop.īut there is another tool available in every image editor that can have a powerful impact on your images and is quite easy to use as well. While there is certainly something to be said for getting your photos just right in camera, one of the wonders of modern digital photography is that you have a myriad of tools at your disposal if you want to fix things later on as well. It’s a fantastic rule of thumb for carpentry but thankfully when it comes to photography you have a bit more leeway. There’s an adage I learned over a decade ago when I did construction work in the summer that I still try to live by measure twice, cut once. In this article, we’ll look at some tips for cropping your images into better compositions.