Clever cropping in DPP

Turn quick snaps into considered compositions with post-production cropping

In pre-digital days, when shooting on rolls of film, we were limited by the amount of photographs that we could capture while on a shoot.

This forced us to consider composition more carefully to avoid wasting film. By contrast, digital photography enables us to shoot hundreds of photos on a single memory card, and with no film or processing costs it’s possible to adopt a more relaxed approach to composition; by shooting hundreds of photographs we are still likely to find at least one decent shot in our memory card’s large collection of image files.

Thanks to applications such as Digital Photo Professional, it’s also possible to turn a mediocre shot into a better image by recomposing it using the Crop tool. When capturing photos on location we may be unaware of distracting objects at the side of the frame. Post-production cropping can remove these objects with ease and create a cleaner composition.

Cropping can overcome lens-related limitations too. In effect you can ‘zoom in’ on a subject by cropping the shot to make it more prominent in the frame. When shooting landscapes, you can crop to change the balance of the scene by making the sky or land more dominant. You can also use the Crop tool to straighten tilted horizons and thus create a more stable-looking image.

Although DPP has a crop overlay grid to help you get a truly horizontal horizon, it does lack the useful rule of thirds overlay grid that can be found in other photo-editing programs, such as Photoshop.