Digital Home Thoughts: Croppings Your Photos the Right Way

"Want to make your cropped digital photos better every time? Because cropping is one of the most common editing tasks in digital photography, these three quick tips will come in handy over and over in the future. Use the rule of thirds...this is a simple photo composition rule that helps create dynamic tension between your subject and setting while also keeping them in harmony with each other. This effect is achieved by framing photos to bring the setting into greater prominence by moving your subject away from the center of your photo. Doing this helps force your audience to move their eyes through the entire composition and give it a fuller appreciation."

Although I'm befuddled when it comes to white balance and exposure, I'm a great cropper. ;-) I try to frame my shots the way I want them, but sometimes a hurried shot just doesn't get the right framing, so cropping is an essential tool. This is also one of the better arguments for needing a high mexapixel count: the more pixels you have in your image, the more you can afford to lose when you crop it and get the image you want at a decent print quality. One of the things I like about Picasa is that it has cropping tools for common photo sizes (4x6, 5x7, 8x10) with locked aspect ratios, so it makes it easy to crop your images to prepare them for printing. That's not to say that you should be sloppy about framing your pictures, relying on a crop to fix them later, but more pixels is always a good thing. ;-)