Capture NX-D

George Cairns demonstrates how to improve composition by cropping and straightening shots

Improve composition with the Crop tool in Capture NX-D

While shooting on holiday you may not always have time to carefully consider your composition – especially if you’re photographing unpredictable subjects, such as children or animals. This can result in badly composed pictures. Take our walkthrough’s start image as an example. The horizon is slightly tilted, so the shot looks off-kilter. The child is a little lost in the frame as we didn’t have time to zoom in for a closer snap. There’s also some nasty sensor spots noticeable in the clear blue sky.

Thanks to Capture NX-D’S tools we can recompose a somewhat disappointing shot to overcome common compositional problems. We’ll demonstrate how to counteract the tilted horizon with the Straighten tool. We’ll reposition the child to comply with the composition aesthetics used by classical artists, courtesy of the Crop tool’s Rule of Thirds overlay grid. We’ll also crop the image to zoom in on the child to make her more prominent in the frame. As a by-product of our crop we can remove sensor spots (without needing to clone them out).

On location we could have rotated our Nikon to capture a portrait-oriented version of the scene. Capture NX-D’S Crop tool enables us to do so after the event, while also ensuring that the recomposed portrait shot matches the aspect ratio of the original landscape image.