Cropping for Effect

Cropping or trimming the edges of your photos is used for more than just ensuring that the store gets your prints right. You can also use cropping to correct your photos or to improve your photos. As you can see with this photo of Kylemore Abbey in Ireland, there is a path with tourists on the left side of the photo and a bald section of sky in the top right. Both are distractions from the main centre of interest. The bald sky in particular is so bright that it will draw your eyes to that corner of the photo and hold them there.

What we need to do is correct those parts of the photo. Since there is a lot of space around the actual photo of the abbey and with the water almost forming a path up to the abbey, we can crop the photo, eliminate the two distracting areas and strengthen the photo all in one step. A sample cropping is shown here.


And is applied. Looking at the resulting photo, you would never know that the distractions have been eliminated.


Don't forget to consider a vertical cropping too. Many photos lend themselves to unorthodox croppings - landscapes are generally considered to be horizontals but sometimes you can create a stronger photo taking or cropping the photo vertically.