Composition - Cropping and Framing

The next photowalk is coming up this weekend. Seeing in Detail, and will include some surprise discussion of Composition and Framing, which can be carried out in the field, but Cropping, an underutilized photo editing tool, can also help in seeing more detail, but after the fact in post-processing.

In a photowalk a couple of years ago we tried out hand-held viewfinders to select the best composition before we took our photos. John Noble had made some wonderful adjustable viewfinders from matte board that could be adjusted to some common aspect ratios.

These aspect ratios become very important when it comes to composition because it is the frame that naturally constrains our vision and brain. It is seldom discussed in photographic compositional rules yet it is the most fundamental aspect of how the composition is perceived. These four boundary lines (I'm assuming for now the frame isn't oval or circular, and that introduces different compositional considerations) change the width and height as the aspect ratio is changed, Each proportion affects the dynamics of what is happening inside that frame.

ratio	common applications
1:1	Square eg Instagram
1:2	Panoramic
2:3	most Digital Cameras & some phones
3:4	Micro Four Thirds Cameras
4:5	Once favoured for Portraits eg 10" by 8"
9:16	Wide Screen TV, phones
10:16	Newer Wide Screen Monitors & TVs

As an exercise, mainly to convince yourself that the frame is the most important compositional aspect (and the cropping tool is one of the best ways to improve your photo). Find a photo you have taken, and then create a series of sub-photos from it but cropping to a few if not all the common ratios shown in the table above.

PhotoEditing Tools :: Cropping in Picasa

After straightening (or levelling) in my opinion the second most useful tool is the crop tool. Often the must be used together to trim off the little blank triangle around the edges. In fact most newer software either does that automatically or gives a fit option in the cropping. However trimming up the edges is not the only reason you should crop and I will talk of other reason in future posts. The cropping tool in picasa dates back a long time but it is very easy to use and has two important features. The first is that it is interactive and it show the area to be trimmed off greyed out. So you can  judge what you are removing. The second is it offer both a freeform (manual) mode where you can stretch out the bow to any size elongation you want as well as fixed ratio crops so that the cropped image will fit certain paper or screen sizes. In this second mode the cropping marks will expand or contract in both dimensions to maintain the selected ratio. The recent version of picasa even give you three example crops and you could click on the most suitable. In this example I'm trimming up the edges on a hand held multi-image panorama for I’m using the manual trim.

See the final crop on flckr

Moving from 2:1 to 3:1

I’ve been doing a number of multi-image stitch panoramas. I agree they usually don’t look their best on social media and computer screens but they can look really impressive when blown up. Then the biggest issues becomes the cost of custom framing. I have found that a few framers have 2:1 (landscape frames) pre-made. Many print-on-canvas services also offer this 2:1 ratio in various sizes. So for some time I have adopted to just use the 2:1 Ratio, when cropping panoramas.

However, the 3:1 ratio is more compelling for panoramas.

Those that enjoyed the ABC TV series SeaChange, might recognise
a heavily refurbished Diver Dan’s Boat Shed

PhotoProject :: How to Photograph Nothing

I just read an interesting article in The Artist Magazine by Paul Talbot-Greaves titled “How to paint nothing” (January 2014), in which he comments,

“Many people have said they probably wouldn’t notice the subject in one of my landscapes and would probably walk straight past the scene, … So just how do you notice a composition of nothing?”

There is a video of Paul painting a watercolour below (it is speed up but takes just over 10minutes, and is well worth watching to see how he uses a simple colour palette and strong tonal shapes, lines of the river, skyline and a few trees to quickly build a wonderful yet conventional landscape composition). Unfortunately a well meaning (and probably very experienced) photo critic would suggest his landscape needs a red canoe with the canoeist in a bright yellow life-vest positioned at the first bottom “thirds point of interest”, but he would be wrong it doesn’t need to be like that (ok it might be if you want to win the camera club photo of the month and he is judging!). It needs the artist eye to see the colour, composition and tone! That’s all.

I am inspired to apply his insights into the photographic process. One in particular is that  “compositional designs are best when strong lighting is involved”, for example using shadows to create exciting negative shapes and add dimension to an image. Paul also is attracted to “the bright, high chroma colours against darker muted tones”

So over the past couple of days I have been quick to pick up my camera whenever I see that strong light variation and strong colours against shadows, and particularly interesting shadow patterns. Did not really matter what the subject was after all it is a photo of nothing, I was just looking for the right lighting ambience, boldish colour and shadows.

This set of images (on the right) are simply of the shadows of a potted yucca plant on my partly open patio doors. I was sitting enjoy a coffee in the sun at the time. I had the foresight to include an EV bracketed set of exposure, so I sent that set off to Google+ Autobackup and this time they did return a decent *HDR autoawesome, but the composition, as shoot, was a bit boring. Also it had a few damaged leaves on the yucca and they were an unnecessary distraction. My favourite tool to fix composition in any photo is the crop tool, It is normally a simple logo of two opposing L shapes, occasional with a curved rotation arrow. Google+ photos has some good edit tools on-line and the crop tool (shown below) has a feature to control the ratio (aspect of horizontal & vertical axis) to keep the crop within given standard size combinations. There is a separate icon at the top of the panel on the right to do any rotational (straightening) adjustment.

I have not bothered about the rule of thirds of any other compositional rule, I was looking for a pleasing combination of colour and shadow and I like the contrast of the vertical door frames and the angled shadows with their lost and found lines feel. An image like this is a great place to experiment with all sort of crops, so don’t stop at your very first try. The wooden door handle on the white door frame is a little distracting but I have not managed to find any cloning tools in Google+ Photo so I have had to downloaded the edited image and then take it through OnOne’s Perfect Enhance 8. Perfect Enhance has a really magic Perfect Eraser which is content aware and does a both quick and reasonable job of removing the handle. Finally I add a big softy vignette.

So the exercise of photographing nothing can be rewarding, and encouraging both seeing more like a painter might but also forcing some creativity in you post processing (in this case perhaps a little more abstract albeit more thoughtful cropping).

PhotoProject :: Squares

  

Spiraling into Divine Composition

I need to begin this discussion by making a strongly held point, that most people intrinsically know good composition and will probably do better than say “the rule of thirds” or similar composition “rules”, just using their eye. However I must admit I have been having a bit of fun trying figure out why the Fibonacci Spiral (its called the Golden Spiral in Lightroom) might be a composition aid? The ratio behind the fibonacci series is roughly 1.618, so it doesn’t neatly cut a shape into one third two thirds but it is close. so I have heard this gold number referred to as the rule of thirds on steroids.  More importantly it has been known to artists as the Divine Proportion since the renaissance, and often used unwittingly by artists and architect before that.


I have found two ways to use the spiral as a guide. Firstly using the inner focus of the spiral to target the main point of interest (the ducks head in this example). So you need to toggle the orientation of the spiral overlay (using <shift> O repeatedly in Lightroom. Alternatively I have found the outer arc of the spiral a good place to line up strong contrast changes, letting them follow the sweeping curve (not shown here). While this second approach doesn’t draw your eye to a specific focus point but it does guide your eye around the image, in a pleasing way. The android app ProCapture has an onscreen Fibonacci spiral to aid composition, which is also fun on the phone because you see it as you are taking the photo..

PhotoProject :: One photo three different crops

I am often asked “What is the most important photo processing technique?”, and my answer is always cropping. From the expression on the face of the questioner, I suspect that was not the answer they wanted. They wanted to hear about some secret photoshop presets or a magic filter and/or a unknown bit of software. However cropping and getting the composition right is definitely one way to take an ordinary photo into something memorable. The next question is usually then “How do I know when the composition is right?” and some comment about the dreariness of the rule of thirds. I tend to agree the rule of thirds and its ever present overlay grid are a bit overdone and under explained. I must admit I tend to just crop by eye and seldom use cropping guides but they can be very helpful to bring you towards that more interesting photo. When I am photographing birds in flight I am definitely concentrating on panning on the birds movement, and keeping the bird in frame and not the composition in the view finders, that can be sorted out later. So here is a little exercise using the same photo, above, and using three other common composition tools from Lightroom 4.

In this case I have a fairly simple 6 by 8 grid. You can choose any setting you like. I have taken the conventional crop in the vertical putting the gull just below the top third (ie 2 grid spaces down). However I wanted to get stronger asymmetry into the horizontal, so I made the gull 4 grid space wide and then I could leave 1 grid spacing behind it and 3 in front. This gives the bird room to appear to fly into.

Artist have long know of the Golden ratio, which is roughly 1.6:1 and I suspect the rule of thirds is just an oversimplification of this ratio. However the simplicity of the golden rule is that is you make focal points and strong edges at or close to the golden ratio from the sides it will automatically be more appealing to the viewing  In this case I used the box enclosed by the ratio to “house” the gull. However it has left the final crop a little to symmetrical for my taste. So…

I wanted to get the asymmetry going so I shifted the crop so That the gulls eye was at the intersection of the ratio’s grid lines and the leading edge of the wind approximately running along the ratio. For me this is both a closer crop and tells a stronger story. The golden ratio is a better default than the rule of thirds in my opinion

This was a bit of a new composition concept for me. I first saw it in a photo app called Pro Capture and have used it a few times but only had mixed results. In this case I like the strong curve of the dark wing, and I moved the crop around till this match the spiral. Horizontally I like the position but I feel the bird may be a little low.
The results are quiet different, but I hope you agree they are all stronger images than the original. At the end of the day I still think once you get your composition confidence you will be able to judge the most appropriate crop by eye.

Every camera has FREE Digital Zoom

The simple feature found in almost all image processing software normally called cropping, givens every camera owner access to a digital zoom. Like the much maligned in camera digital zoom feature there are limits. If you zoom in too far your image becomes blocky, noisy and fuzzy, The digital camera will probably have an interpolation built into it6s functions that tries to smooth out and sharpen the image as you zoom in. It will also possibly resize the interpolated output. Another common image processing tool sharpen might help extend the zoom range just a little on your cropped image. However don’t go overboard with sharpening (it can introduce unfortunate edge effects at contrast boundaries in the image)
So here is a recent example, I was taking a wide multi-image panoramic view, with my normal lens 50mm (75mm equivalent to a 35mm) Then I notice some swan flying past in formation and with no time to change lenses I just snapped an image (of them way in the distance, see image above). I then cropped this in picasa and added just a slight tweak of sharpening. The result is not satisfactory to blow up but looks fine at 15 by 10cm (6” by 4”) the standard photo processing snap shot size

Autostitching an Extra Wide Sky

I thought that I might be able to escape the wind but still get the dramatic skys if I went inland, perhpas to the river. I was only partly right, the wind was just a fraction less, but the blue patch above was opening up and the setting sun was colouring some of the clouds. A perfect moment to capture a big panorama with the sky & clouds as the subject. I didn’t have my tripod handy so I turned my camera to get vertical shoots and zoomed in just enough and then carefully took a set of overlapping photos with approx. 10 degree rotation between each shutter fall. The results was 21 photos in the set (see above). A bonus I was hoping to get was a lovely clear moon. I knew if I could capture all this I would get a great image.

The exposure on the whole set was fine and my hand held horizontal sweep straight enough so I just took everything “as is” into autostitch. The problem I find doing these with the free demo version is I get to a certain size and I get the very terse warning out of memory and that’s it, Autostitch wont play anymore. I think this boundary is the physical memory on your machine rather than anything hardcoded. So I just have to ease off a bit, in this case I found 16,400 pixel wide would work (and take 64 passes and 20minutes to run) which gives me an image I can safely print at around 54” (ie 16,400/300 because the print is likely to be 300 dpi) or around 140cm wide. Big enough! I could go bigger with microsoft’s ICE, but if I do that will be a separate post.

The only other step was to crop out the ragged edges, using picasa and the tiniest of straightening. I still need to find a nice way to find all the detail of these extra wide images, without having to resort to photosynth (that is easier using ICE).

Cropping & Composition

I was happy with this photo, it did achieve what I had seen. The break in the clouds the pools of light on the beach and the billowing dark clouds above. So I figure it is a good example to demonstrate how cropping can help improve composition and what Features I wanted to enhance. The Center of interest is slightly off-set to the right, something i did deliberately in the viewfinder. It has has two distinct focal points, firstly the dark against light tones in the clouds, above the brightly lit waves below. There were three distinct lines/shapes for the eye to follow already. So I concentrated on was keeping the center of interest close to the vertical line that divides the composition into two thirds and one third (the rule thirds) That just left the option of vertical cropping to more a more panoramic format, keeping the lower focal points in the golden ratio from the top & bottom. The lower cropping also accentuates the strong diagonal of the reflection on the wet sand.

Sometimes the Photoshop Crop Tool is all you need?

You’ve probably already seen this photo photo with the caption "no, I did not photoshop this" but gizmodo, the bible for those with the must have shiny toys, give proof that it was photoshoped. Which brings me to the point that the easiest way to improve your digital photos is via cropping and you don’t need expensive photo editing software, like photoshop, to be able to achieve that.

Picasa from google is free to download, and works on both windows & apple mac, has an easy to use and nicely visual crop tools. So does Windows Live Photogallery and  gimp. So no need to fork out a small fortune to start improving your photos.

There are also now many on-line photo editors,like Picnik, which is available to edit within flickr & facebook. A new kid on the block is Aviary, which is written in flash and thus a little slower. The cropping is part of the Phoenix image editor. However it is an amazing full featured suite for a free on-line tool. So go get creative.

Picasa 3.6 now available

Most digital camera, even the inexpensive ones, come with their own bundled software. These bundles usually include some way to upload from your camera to a computer, a photo manager to browse photos on your computer and at least some rudimentary photo editing facilities. Often there are a few fancy add-ons like making calendars, posters, cards. At its simplest Picasa does all the same basic tasks as you camera bundled software, it doesn’t have the fancy bits. However what it does do, it does well and without fuss. It has been my preferred photo manager for a long time down. It free to download from google, so it you haven’t tried it yet, try it now.’

The best new features relates to the Collaborative Web Albums, which allow you to upload  to a friend's album right from Picasa. Before you freak out about internet security you have to invite collaborators to your own albums. So far I have found Picasa’s web album type of security good, and I do suggest family photos should not be made public. Uploading, sharing and the automatic face recognition can also become part of your single photo import step. All nice but of little interest to me. What pleased me most, in version 3.6, was a simple change that I have been waiting for for a long time. The ability to have a custom size crop. You could always do a manual crop (to any size you wanted)but if you wanted a specific aspect ratio it was fiddly trial and error exercise. I used to resort to photo.net

Cropping & Rule of Thirds

I was scanning some older photos, colour prints, taken on film on a Cannon compact camera. Whilst this one was a fraction ”misty” I saw it had potential but falls down, as so many holiday snaps do, compositionally.

“Good composition gets the viewer to look into the picture, not scan across it”

    ….quote from my upcoming workshop

Cropping is one of the easiest ways to improve the composition of a photo, and typically that means identifying the areas of interest, and placing then is a good place for the eye to settle. The rule of thirds is often quotes a the gospel for photographers, but it is just a simplification of the golden ratio used by artist for centuries. The idea is to put the most important compositional elements, like the shore of the lake , the villa and the silhouetted trees, onto or straddling the imaginary lines dividing the image into thirds. Some digital cameras now even come with a mode to display these lines on the LCD “viewfinder”.

Yes I used the picasa retouch (cloning tool) to hide the date stamp.

The cropping tool

One of the best and easiest to use tools for digital photos is the cropping tools, which cuts a desired section out of an image, trimming off unwanted parts (at the edges).  Using Picasa, cropping is easy. In the editing view, click Crop. There are three default sizes(in cm  10 x 15, 13 x 18, and 20 x 25). The fourth option, Manual, is the one I use most, it allow you to click a point in the shot and the drag the mouse pointer to selection the portion that you want to crop. The rest of the photo will go grey. Click Preview to see the crop. If you like it, click Apply; otherwise click Reset and try again.

Why a cropping tool is so good? It allows you to improve the composition of your photo. Most digital cameras now do a wonderful job of exposure and focus, but none as yet include a magic button to make your image interesting. That is in my opinion now the biggest difference between a mediocre photographer and a great one. There is plenty of advice on the web on the basics of good composition.  Sometimes you do need to use your judgement and not follow the rules blindly, for example I left the horizon in the middle of my final crop, because there were enough shapes and lines to draw the viewers eye into the image.

Most Photo software, including the software bundled with your camera, and even  photo kiosks will have a cropping tool.  Many cameras now have built in cropping tool. So go now and try cropping that photo you liked but where disappointed with when it was printed.

Cropping

One of the very best "enhancement" technique for a new digital photopgrapher(and experienced ones, and film photographer as well) is the simple method of trimming out unnecessary parts of the image, a technique know as cropping.



How you do it is very simple you just selecet a smaller area of the photo, normally using the mouse to drag out or reposition a selection rectangle. The cropping tools in software varies a lot, and here I am using picasa. Even photo kiosk at the photo processor will offer cropping and it can both make an artstic difference (by improving composition) and avoid chopping off peoples heads (when those machines "crop to fit" the usually centralize the portion to display). Some cameras even have a cropping feature. If you have tried you systems cropping tool yet, do an experiment get two of three ok photos and cropp them, print them out and show them around. See how many peope realise they are even the same photo.

Finally a work of warning, remember the size pou want to print, and crop to this size. Good software these days will autoresize your selection box to match that aspect ratio. If there are strong artistic/composition reasons, to go to other sizes remember you will probably have to it print larger and use the scissors on the print