Cropping in Lightroom

A few weeks ago I shot at the Viera Wetlands here, near Melbourne Florida (I’ll have a post on the shoot this weekend). Thanks to a buddy of mine, Robert Wicker, he spotted a few baby Limpkins.  They were only about 5 inches tall. As I started to edit the photos, I experimented with cropping in Lightroom.

Once you select the cropping tool (keyboard shortcut R), you can experiment with cropping overlays. Select Tools>Crop Guide Overlay. You will have the choice of Grid, Thirds, Diagonal, Triangle, Golden Ratio, and Golden Spiral. Once the crop tool is selected, you can use the keyboard short cut O to cycle through the choices.

Original Image

Cropped using Golden Triangle (usually meant for photos with diagonal lines)

Cropped using Golden Spiral

You can achieve a different look by simply changing your crop. Keep in mind, when you crop an image, you are “throwing away” pixels. This will lower your image quality. It’s always best to crop in the camera, but in this case, I couldn’t get close enough to my subject and I was shooting with a 200-400 VR lens!