Crop

This command lets you crop an image, discarding that part of the image that lies outside the cropping rectangle. The cropping rectangle can be both resized and rotated.

Cropping Rectangle

You select the cropping rectangle by dragging the four corners, the four sides, or the interior of the crop box displayed over the input image. The width, height, size, and margins of the resulting image are updated in the crop dialog as you adjust the cropping rectangle. You can also rotate the cropping rectangle by dragging one of the corners while holding down the Shift key.

Crop Box Tool Bar

This control lets you reset or re-center the cropping rectangle

-- makes the cropping rectangle include the entire input image.

-- centers the cropping rectangle horizontally

-- sets the cropping rectangle to match the currently zoomed and scrolled view of the input image

Proportions

This control lets you specify if or how the proportions of the cropping rectangle are constrained.

Arbitrary -- lets you adjust the cropping rectangle (by clicking and dragging or by entering exact margin values) to any proportions you wish.

Preserve Original -- preserves the original proportions when adjusting the cropping rectangle

Custom -- lets you enter width and height values. Once you enter these values, the proportions of the cropping rectangle will be locked to this ratio. For example, if you increase or decrease the width of the cropping rectangle, its height will automatically be adjusted to maintain the proportions of the rectangle as close as possible to the specified ratio.

If you select one of the standard proportions, the width and height are set accordingly and the proportions of the cropping rectangle are locked to the specified ratio. To specify a vertical orientation for the cropping rectangle, select Portrait; to specify a horizontal orientation, select Landscape.

If you apply the Crop transformation to a new image whose dimensions are different from the original image, Proportions are reset to Arbitrary, but the size and location of the crop box relative to the image is preserved.

Custom Proportions

The width and height readouts display the ratio of the width of the output image to its height (not including any borders).

Grid

This control lets you superimpose a grid over your image as a composition guide – None, NxN (from 2x2 up to 999x999), Custom, Diagonal, Golden Mean, Westhoff Diagonal, Golden Triangle Left and Golden Triangle Right are supported.

Custom Composition Guides

Custom composition guides can be created and stored as files in the Composition Guides sub-folder of the default settings folder. The filenames of the composition guide files in this folder are listed at the end of the grid menu. Click here for information on creating custom composition guides. If you use a custom composition guide and then rename or delete the file or if you move to a computer on which the composition guide is not installed, you will get an error message and the grid will be set to None.

Width, Height and Image Size

The width and height readouts display the width and height of the output image in the current units. The Image Size readout shows the size of the image data in memory in megabytes (MB).

Units

The units control lets you select the units used in the width, height, and margin readouts. You may select pixels, in, mm, or cm. Regardless of the units setting, the up/down margin adjustment buttons always increment or decrement the position of the cropping rectangle by a single pixel at a time.

Margins and Angle

Left, right, top, and bottom margin widths are displayed in two rows.

The margin settings control the width of the left, right, top, and bottom margins in the current units. Margins are the amount sliced off the input image on each side. To the right of each control is a pair of buttons you can use to make single pixel adjustments to the margin widths, giving you fine control over the positioning of the cropping rectangle. Margins can be set either by entering numbers directly into the controls or by adjusting the cropping rectangle overlay on the input image window.

The Angle control show the rotation angle of the crop box in degrees measured clockwise. You can enter an angle in the control if you need to set the value directly. Otherwise it is updated automatically as you rotate the crop box.

Resize

This checkbox gives you the option to resize the cropped image. When checked, additional controls become visible. Since the resizing is performed as a separate operation after cropping, it is not reflected in the output image until you click the OK or Apply button.

If the Resample box is unchecked, the image dimensions in pixels are left unchanged, but the resolution (dpi) setting is adjusted to alter the physical dimensions of the image according to your specification.

You then set the width or height of the image in inches, cm or mm.

If the Resample box is checked, additional controls become visible:

You set the width of height of the image to a given physical size in pixels, inches, cm or mm. You can also specify the resolution in dpi as well as the resampling method.

Default Settings

When you save the current crop settings as defaults (using the Settings menu), the cropping rectangle is also saved. Since this rectangle only applies to images of the same dimensions, it needs to be adjusted when the settings are applied to an image of a different size. The way this is done depends on the Proportions setting.

If the new image is the same size as the original image, the cropping rectangle and its proportions are preserved.

If Proportions is set to Arbitrary, the cropping rectangle is set as a proportion of the image width and height. For example, if you cropped the original image to include just the right half and then saved this as the default, applying those settings to other images would also crop just the right half, regardless of the size and shape of the image.

If Proportions is set to anything other than Arbitrary and the image size has changed, the new cropping rectangle is made as large as possible with the specified proportions, ignoring the size and location of the cropping rectangle in the default settings.

Settings Menu

Reset cropping rectangle in batch mode -- If this item is checked, then the cropping rectangle is reset for each new image when Crop is executed as part of a Batch Process. Otherwise, the cropping rectangle from the previous image is used as a starting point.

Tips

There are two useful techniques for making very precise adjustments to the cropping rectangle. First, you can zoom the input image in to 1:1 or higher so you can see exactly where the edges of the cropping region lie. Second, you can adjust the cropping region in one-pixel increments using the up/down arrows in the margin settings.