Lightroom: Crop & Overlays
category: Lightroom • 1 min read
Some photographers are geniuses, some photographers are purists. However a photo comes out of the camera, it is and cannot be changed or altered. The photos are always full-frame… Painting is the “art of adding to a blank canvas”. Photography is the “art of removing from real-life onto a photo”. I don’t have that luck of being such a photographic genius. I’m no Cartier-Bresson, I strive, but I’m not there yet. I crop most of my photos.
Everybody knows that Lightroom includes cropping tools. By Typing R, in any module, Lightroom will take you to the crop tool in the Develop module. Then you can crop left, right, top and/or bottom.
The standard overlay while in the crop tool is: the rule of the thirds. But Lightroom offers different overlays. You can cycle between each overlay by typing O. And not only that, you can change the orientation of the overlay.
The crop overlays are:
- Grid
- Third
- Diagonal
- Triangle
- Golden Ratio
- Golden Spiral
Lightroom: View Crop Guide Overlay, Photographer
I use the various crop overlays to evaluate the photo, before and after my cropping of the photo.