(Left) BEFORE: What do you do with a great photo but with some boring parts in it?
(Right) AFTER: Crop and keep the best of it, of course.
Cropping photos can improve them dramatically. But, beware, it can also result in loss of quality. Guinevere Sofer shows how this can be avoided
Whether you are on vacation or at a party, there are always plenty of opportunities to take photos.
To make your photos more interesting, you can always crop closer into the image. Cropping simply means cutting away the uninteresting areas in the photo, thus leaving the more interesting parts for the viewer to focus on.
Cropping to Improve
Typically, when a photo is cropped, it needs to be resized back to its original dimensions.
Say, for example, you have a photo of you and someone else at a seaside resort. It’s one of your favourite photos because you look great in it.
Sadly, there are some ‘uninteresting’ parts (or persons) in the photo that you no longer like. The easiest solution is to crop away all the boring or irrelevant stuff, leaving behind a photo of you – albeit much smaller in size.
Don’t Be Surprised
If the photo was taken with a phone cam, you would be shocked by the results. The quality of the photo from a phone cam degrades rapidly after it is cropped and resized.
The resulting photo is typically pixelated, and the details are muddy. (See example A)
The left photo is the original from the phone cam.
The right photo was cropped and resized from the original file.
Note the loss in details on the right photo when it is enlarged.
You can easily avoid this by using a Compact Digital Camera.
For Better Results
On the other hand, if the photo had been taken with a Compact Digital Camera, the results would be much better.
A Compact Digital Camera’s resolution, superior lens and processors capture the details dramatically better than those of the phone cam.
These features also allow you to resize it larger after cropping, with minimal loss of quality. (See example B)
In short, photos taken with Compact Digital Cameras can give boring photos a second chance, and allow you to turn them from something boring into something interesting.
Since photos capture precious moments you’d want to keep, re-crop and resize them to enhance the photos and the memories.
In order to enable that to be possible, bring your Compact Digital Camera to all your special occasions.
You’ll be glad you did.
The original image on the left was taken with a Canon Supershot SX270HS.
Even though the image on the right was cropped and resized considerably, it still retained its details of the corrugated tin roof and blades of grass.
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