Last but certainly not least, an important piece of post processing is the crop tool. Cropping is essentially the resizing or reframing of your original image. This is done for two reasons mostly. Either you want to

Camera images are often sized in a 3:2 aspect ratio which means one side is 3 inches long, the other is 2 inches wide. This prints a 4 x 6 image without the need to readjust the original photo. Everything you captured will print in the 4 x 6. If for any reason you need to print another size image, like an 8×10, you will lose parts of your image in the printing. Unless you pre crop your images, you may be surprised at what gets cut off when you send your 2:3 aspect ratio image to the lab for printing. It’ll usually cut off a bit from all the edges, so look at where important elements in your picture are positioned. To prevent this kind of surprise cropping of your image; and to keep your subjects in the frame of your choosing, use the Crop tool in Picasa, Adobe Lightroom, or Photoshop once you’ve gotten it onto your computer.

I use cropping for both reasons, and it is often a necessary part of the post processing process. There are times that a raw captured image contains a stray object which doesn’t fit with the subject of your photo, so it is advantageous to use the tool to crop out the unnecessary elements and keeping the subject isolated and easily discernable.

After (top) Before (below)

Here I use the crop tool to make a not so great image, a better image. The angle was weird, and the elements in the picture weren’t clearly within bounds. Cropping so that the Conifer tree and house stood out against the blue sky as prominent subjects helped the image stand out on its own.

Here are some other examples of Cropping used for similar reasons. I try to remove as many distracting ( incomplete) entities from the frame as I can. There may be some additional color processing in these images but I’m asking you to study the elements in the before image, and then evaluate what I have cropped out in the After.