Set ’em straight

Crop and straighten in Lightroom

While looking through your Nikon’s viewfinder, you can zoom and pan the lens to compose the photo. You may know what makes a good composition, or you might use an intuitive point-and-shoot approach, but often it’s only when looking at your photos later that you can ascertain which is the best composed.

When taking the picture you may not notice a distracting object at the edge of the frame. When directing a model in a studio shoot, for example, you’ll be more attentive to his or her pose than to any bits of lighting kit that might stray into the frame. And you may not notice problems such as tilted horizons until after the shoot.

With the help of Lightroom’s Crop Overlay tool, however, you can remove distracting objects, straighten any wonky horizons and even turn a landscape- oriented photo into a portrait-oriented one. Modern Nikon D-SLRs produce very high resolution images, enabling you to crop quite severely (perhaps to make certain features look more prominent in the frame) yet still produce large prints.

Cropping RAW files in Lightroom is also non-destructive, so you can always restore the cropped photo’s original composition if you need to.