To Crop, or Not to Crop...

[Fstop Manalo]

Not to crop. Its good composition!

[PhotoRob]

Not to crop. Its good composition!

Thanks Raul (or Gabriel) !

[wmoore]

Don't crop, likes good as it is.

[PhotoRob]

Don't crop, likes good as it is.

Thanks Warrick, appreciate the feedback!

[orlcam88]

I like the original also but I thought I'd give it a shot in cropping. Here's my version of it. I liked the shadows but I also felt that the space in front is needed also. It may appear that it's too centered but I think including the shadow should negate that.
[IMG][/IMG]

[PhotoRob]

I like the original also but I thought I'd give it a shot in cropping. Here's my version of it. I liked the shadows but I also felt that the space in front is needed also. It may appear that it's too centered but I think including the shadow should negate that.
[IMG][/IMG]

Thanks Orlando, that does look good, appreciate your feedback...

[John Morton]

If you were to drop that, you wouldn't want to do it by much - that's pretty well exactly perfect!

One of my Photoshop plug-ins is the "Power Retouche Golden Ratio" overlay, which defines various compositional alignments to allow one to see how image elements might be accentuated through cropping. I applied that to your photo, resized the overlay so that the 'Golden Spiral' centered on the child (maintaining the aspect ratio of the photo), and this is what I ended up with:



Very close to what you had done by eye!

The actual crop would look like this:



...but I can't honestly say that it looks at all better than what you originally did!

[PhotoRob]

If you were to drop that, you wouldn't want to do it by much - that's pretty well exactly perfect!

One of my Photoshop plug-ins is the "Power Retouche Golden Ratio" overlay, which defines various compositional alignments to allow one to see how image elements might be accentuated through cropping. I applied that to your photo, resized the overlay so that the 'Golden Spiral' centered on the child (maintaining the aspect ratio of the photo), and this is what I ended up with:



Very close to what you had done by eye!

The actual crop would look like this:



...but I can't honestly say that it looks at all better than what you originally did!

Gotta love those overlays, that's impressive how close Orlando got matching to the pattern. Thanks for taking the time to post the details...

[orlcam88]

If you were to drop that, you wouldn't want to do it by much - that's pretty well exactly perfect!

One of my Photoshop plug-ins is the "Power Retouche Golden Ratio" overlay, which defines various compositional alignments to allow one to see how image elements might be accentuated through cropping. I applied that to your photo, resized the overlay so that the 'Golden Spiral' centered on the child (maintaining the aspect ratio of the photo), and this is what I ended up with:



Very close to what you had done by eye!

The actual crop would look like this:



...but I can't honestly say that it looks at all better than what you originally did!

I didn't know Photoshop has that. Good to know. I have a few photo's that I'm struggling with on whether to crop or not. And where to crop knowing I should. Sometimes it's easier to see other peoples photo's than my own.

[annie5154]

No crop ... it is beautiful as it is

[Cantab]

My vote is with the no croppers. It looks very good as is.

[Cantab]

One of my Photoshop plug-ins is the "Power Retouche Golden Ratio" ...

John, Do you find the other Power Retouche plug-ins useful?

[John Morton]

John, Do you find the other Power Retouche plug-ins useful?

Hi, Bruce;

Yes I do. I initially purchased the set for the Black and White Studio, since I started into digital with a dedicated 35mm film scanner and lots of black and white film; and at the time, I traded a few emails with the developer of Power Retouche who suggested I might benefit from the entire plug-in package. He was right.

There are probably a few filters there I haven't used but most of them I have; and some of them are my standard 'go to' solutions for photo editing. The interface allows each filter to be applied selectively to the image being edited, to varying degrees (+/- ~100%) with individual sliders for blacks, darks, midtones, lights and whites - which is really handy; and of course one can always use Edit/Fade upon running a filter, too.

[Cantab]

John, thanks for the info. I'm going to download the demo pack and shake my piggy bank to see how many euros are in it.

[John Morton]

Hi, Bruce;

I used the 'Anti Aliasing' filter recently when I needed to upsample a GIF of a commercial logo to add into a staff photo, and needed to smooth the edges of the logo. I use to use the 'Black Definition' filter all the time when working with scanned 35mm images; but not nearly as often now (just a bit to tweak some photos; but there isn't anything else like this filter that I've seen anywhere). The 'Black and White Studio' I use all the time, even using it on a duplicate layer to adjust the tonal balance of color images (portraits, for instance). The 'Contrast' filter is my main contrast editor, because it allows me to adjust black and white contrast and color contrasts separately. I use the 'Dynamic Range Compressor' filter at very low settings of 5% to 10% on a lot of photos, and often in conjunction with 'Black Definition,' to fine tune the shadows of HDR images. 'Golden Section' is often helpful as a guide when making cropping decisions; 'Histogram Repair' can be handy; I've used the 'Illumination Editor' once and again but I rarely go that route with my images; 'Radial Density Corrector' is very useful for creating vignettes; the 'Sharpness' filter works well and I will usually use that on the "L" channel after converting to LAB color space or if I am lazy I'll just apply it to a duplicate layer image in RGB and then immediately use the "fade" option under "Edit" to changethe blend mode to Luminosity, to avoid any color shifts in the sharpening halos; the 'Soft Filter' is great for portraits because I can apply it as a percentage just to the lights and soften skin tone without blurring any dark elements (eyebrows, eyelashes, etc.); 'Toned Photos' is great for black and white images that are still in RGB color space; and I use the 'White Balance' on pretty well every image I bring into Photoshop, to fine tune my images (I'll often fade the adjustment to retain a little of the original lighting's coloration).

So, as I mentioned, I don't use all the filters but I do use a significant number of them quite often, and I would not hesitate to use the other filters where appropriate to my own workflow.

The only downside is, maybe I haven't been using Photoshop for as many things as I could be, since I tend to go to the Power Retouche filters rather than use the Photoshop equivalent!