Two Important Reasons You Should Always Consider Cropping Your Photos

The crop tool might not be as fancy as many others in your editing suite, but its importance cannot be overstated. Here are two very important reasons you should always think about starting with the crop tool when you first sit down to work on your images.

Removing Distractions

The first, and perhaps most important, reason for cropping your images is to remove distractions or unwanted elements in the frame. When we take any kind of photo, regardless of genre, we have to make conscious choices about the elements we want to keep in our frame and the elements that are unnecessary or extraneous.  

Sometimes, making those decisions about which elements to keep and which elements to discard is easy. Other times, it’s not so easy. In those situations, when you’re torn about whether you should keep something in your frame or not, ask yourself this question: is this element enhancing the image or strengthening the composition? If it’s not, then get rid of it. That’s when the crop tool becomes your best friend.  

Let me give you an example so you can see how useful the crop tool is in removing distractions.

This image above was taken at a shrine in the south of Japan when we were celebrating a milestone in my youngest daughter’s life. Unfortunately, my eldest daughter, cheeky and uncooperative as ever, decided she’d try to photobomb every image I took. Here’s one instance of how she tried her best to get in front of the lens: just as I was about to push the shutter button, she took two big steps backwards and managed to get her half her head in the frame. 

In this case, it’s a very easy decision to just crop my daughter out of the bottom right corner of the frame. Going back to that earlier question, there’s absolutely no reason to keep her there, as she’s not adding anything to the composition — quite the opposite, as she’s taking the focus off the subjects. Here's the result after I cropped her out and cropped a little in from the left side of the frame too.

It’s worth noting that once you’ve used the Crop Tool to get rid of any unwanted distractions, you can then call on a vast array of tools in Photoshop, Lightroom, or your editing platform of choice to follow up with some cleanup work. In Photoshop, you’ve got the Patch tool, the Content-Aware tool, the Healing Brush tool, the Spot Healing Brush tool, and the Clone Stamp tool, to name a few. However, for quickly removing unwanted elements in your frame, especially near the edges, you can’t beat the Crop tool, and it should arguably be your first tool of choice once you sit down to edit. 

Cropping for Composition 

The second major reason you should always consider cropping your images is for better composition. In short, composition refers to how you position all the elements in your frame, including your subject. There are many great articles here on Fstoppers discussing composition, so if it’s something you’re interested in knowing more about, I encourage you to do a search.  

Very often, when you’re out shooting photos of things that are not static objects like mountains or rocks, it’s very difficult to get a perfect composition in camera. That’s especially true when you’re trying to shoot kids. My youngest daughter has the attention span of a gnat when she’s out in a new place with lots of shiny trinkets and games around her, so hoping for a perfect composition every time I shoot her is like hoping I don’t see new gray hairs every time I look in the mirror — impossible.  

Aware of that, I always shoot wider than I need to because I know I can come back later when it’s time to edit and use the crop tool for better composition. Let me give you a visual example of what I’m talking about in the image below.  

In this first image, before I’ve used the crop tool, you can see that there’s a lack of balance or symmetry in relation to where my daughter is positioned in the frame. As you look at it, she’s slightly closer to the right side of the frame than the left. I don’t like that, especially as she’s looking towards the right side of the frame, and I never want to have my subjects looking to the more closed side of the frame rather than the open side.  

With that in mind, I cropped in from both sides — more from the left — so that my daughter is now positioned far more centrally and equally distanced from both left and right side. As an added bonus, I was able to crop out my other daughter’s arm and the balloon, as they were distractions not adding anything to the image. Further, by cropping from the top and the bottom of the frame, I was able to put my daughter’s eyes on the top horizontal grid line, which I often like to do with one-person portraits.

An interesting side not to be aware of is that if you’re not one for following rigid rules and you like to play around with experimental forms or compositions, you don’t have to use the time-honored rule of thirds grid to position your elements within the frame. If you’re using Photoshop, you can just click on the crop tool, and along the taskbar at the top, there’s a drop-down menu giving you lots of different options, including the golden spiral and golden ratio overlays. In Lightroom, you can just click the letter “O” in the Develop Module and cycle through the different crop overlays to find something that you like.

Summing Up 

In the last five years or so, the advancements of editing technology in the world of photography and beyond have been absolutely breathtaking. For some, it’s been too much, and they think we’re entering a world that is more about computer production than the art of taking photos. However, some things stand the test of time.  

One of those is composition. Indeed, the rule of thirds was first written down back in 1797, yet it’s as relevant today as it ever was. Likewise, the golden ratio dates all the way back to 300 BC. 

That said, it’s not always easy to get the perfect composition in camera, so when we sit down at our computers and start the editing process, the best way to get a composition you like is by using the crop tool. But it’s not just about composition. The crop tool is also perfect for getting rid of unwanted distractions in your images, especially ones near the edges of your frame.  

So, the next time you sit down to edit, remember, it’s always a good idea to consider starting everything with the crop tool.