I’m not quite sure why you do!

But that’s exactly my point twisted about. I don’t have trouble working with any AR, from your responses it seems you consider that AR is the be all and end all of photography.

now by your own admission, can’t measure up.

That’s a nonsense argument, and you know it. I never said anything of the sort.

If you mean this:

TTBOMK you can’t simply set an aspect ratio and then size that around the information you want to keep.

I’m talking about the limitations of the editing software, and it’s inability to work directly with all aspect ratios.

The problem here Rob is that you’re arguing not only with someone who knows what he’s doing, his photographs are proof of that fact. I know nothing about aspect ratios and all the other issues which you are discussing, the simple fact is that Paul’s photos, with all due respect, are absolutely light years ahead of yours in terms of their aesthetic appeal. You can put that down to whatever you wish, equipment, knowledge, understanding or just simple talent.

Regards,

kev35

If you don’t understand what we’re discussing, why are you commenting, unless it is simply to put me down? Something I’ve noted you have an increasing habit of doing recently.

Frankly, Paul has equipment that is light years better than mine, so of course his results in terms of image quality are going to be miles better. I simply cannot compete, if indeed it is a competition.

You’re making the mistake, in your argument, that everyone wants to view digital photos on a 4:3 monitor. They don’t. Different techniques are required these days to get an image that matches your needs, or even to cater for several different display media.

You have to move on from the blinkered view that a photo is only any good if it fits a postcard, or you must keep the same AR as the original image. These days, that’s bonkers.

As I said earlier. I often have to make my photos fit several different ARs, and they don’t all have presets you can rely upon to cut a nice handy square(ish) picture. In fact 1:1 is one of the AR presets that aren’t offered in particular, but I think you (should) get my point. There’s often little choice but to use Free Form and tailor for your own particular needs.

So AR isn’t everything, it’s often the last thing that I consider these days. And composition is mostly worked out during processing.

When you say “film” the word “arc” springs to mind.

It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re uploading to sites like JP then you’ll have to use either a 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio. I find 3:2 works well for everything I shoot in aviation and frankly, the vast majority of digital cameras naturally produce 3:2 or 4:3 anyway (almost all non-four thirds DSLR’s are 3:2, the same as 35mm film), so why change it?

Paul

But that’s only with regard to those aspect ratio’s. It’s got nothing to do with cropping, as such. You’re better of cropping first, resize, then adjust for aspect ratio.

Cropping is for eliminating unnecessary information, it’s not much to do with aspect ratio (unless you over/under crop in the wrong direction).

Surely the dimensions are what matters. The aspect ratio is whatever you prefer, but when you’re actually cropping an image you want to get the details you want within that crop.

So, simply adjust the CM of whichever you prefer to use “height” or “width” to include more or less of the subject.

Personally, I do it slightly differently, I don’t retain the original aspect ratio, I select one that fits the media I want to view it on. For a computer screen, in my case, that’s 16:9 or 16:10 (depending on which screen I want it for). If it’s for Internet viewing, I use 4:3.

But I also resize my images. If you use only crop, the image can end up too fierce, or not enough.

Also, I don’t use inches or centimeters, I use pixels in order 1360×768, 1440×900 or 800×600.

How do I do it?

1. Manually crop the image, but make it taller than I actually need. Ensure that you don’t crop so severely that resizing won’t increase the size of the cropped image – for instance, if I want an 800×600 image I will only crop down to 1200pixels wide, so that I have at least 1.5 times the number of required pixels to work with when resizing, next.

2. Resize for width. This also resizes the height automatically, which is why I always crop taller than I need.

3. Set a crop for the height parameter and move the “crop” area up or down to include the detail I want. Confirm the crop, and wallah.

Before doing all that though I clear up for digital camera noise.

Then, once cropped appropriately, I do anything else I might need, such as sharpness (using the unsharp mask).

Hope this helps.