Learning Lightroom - First Serious Attempt

[HaseebM]

This is my take in LR5.

[rpcrowe]

I totally agree with Adrian when he mentions: "Do not crop your images first: doing so just expands the noise when you process the image. Work on the entire image and then crop it at the end. "

I will go even further...

After initial white balance, exposure, noise reduction and contrast, etc., etc. is done along with any layer work needed, I save the image as an uncropped and without final output sharpening PSD Master image.

I then crop it to how I need it and sharpen it as per my final output.

That way, if I ever need a differently cropped image, I can simply go back to the PSD Master image, crop it to how I need it and apply output sharpening.

I therefore have the following images saved: RAW, Master PSD and final output images.

I learned this the hard way when I needed to make a calendar but found that I had cropped and saved the images I needed in portrait configuration. I needed horizontal or landscape cropping for the calendar images.

[ajohnw]

I'm not at all sure cropping expands noise is a very good way to explain that aspect especially as many images finish up much smaller than the original and are posted on the web.

Size reduction can have a significant effect on noise so in theory cropping reduces that aspect but it's clearly a matter of degree before it can have a significant effect, It's doubt if Adobe products actually crop until the image is actually saved anyway. The correct way to use a PP package when the facility is available is to allow it to save processing pipe files - some call them side car files. These contain all of the steps that were used to obtain the final image including any cropping. This means that the original can be reloaded and even the crop can be changed if desired. Any other setting can be changed as well.

John
-

[Adrian]

Just to add a minor point: my workflow also includes protective steps.

Create a folder for each project with 4 sub folders in it"
1 Save original raw files - these are never touched again
2 From them select the good ones and copy into your favoured processing system (I use photoshop or lightroom depending on what I am doing) - these files are saved as "processed raw"
3 I save a JPEG version of processed files
4 I save a TIFF version of processed files

Back the lot up.

This enables almost anything to be recoverable and easily found.

Adrian

[davidedric]

Remember this is a thread about Lightroom. Lightroom is completely non-destructive whether you are processing RAW jpeg or whatever. The cropped portion is NEVER discarded, just hidden from view.

Dave

[Mike Buckley]

There are exceptions to everything, including typical workflow as it applies to cropping. If I have an image of a black wall and a white wall and I want to crop to exclude the black wall, I'll do so probably as the first step of my workflow. That's because when adjusting the tone curve, I don't want to have to deal with the extreme information in the photo that is not going to be included in the final version. Relative to Dave's comment that this is a thread pertaining to Lightroom, I'm not sure whether cropping for this reason would make a difference when using Lightroom.

As for the impact that cropping has on noise, my hunch is that it has relatively little practical application. If I'm right about that, it would be consistent with a lot of so-called truisms about photography.