Cropping Tool

Happy Monday !! I hope everyone is having a great week so far.

Cropping is, fortunately, one of the easiest to use tools. Unfortunately, its also one of the most underrated. An easy trick I've found to spruce up a picture is to crop it. Tighter. Voila ! You have instantly a picture thats just been given a facelift without meddling with contrast brightness or any of those other confusing options. The symbol for the crop tool, is usually the same between different software and it looks like this

To get an extra oomph to a picture you can use the crop tool to rotate it slightly left or right. I'm not a big fan of spending too much time post processing so I prefer to rotate the picture in camera. But, when I was just starting out, I admit, I was clicker happy. I'd go click click clicking without paying too much attention to composition. Result? A straight boring picture. Then I'd try to rotate it during edits. It was a little confusing initially to understand the rotation because its contrary to what logic might suggest.  But once I figured it out, it was actually quite simple. The direction of rotation you use, will actually be opposite to the direction in which your subject  to be tilted. Confused? Let me try to explain with an example

Here's Ms Muffin as I had originally shot.

Here's what the final product looks like

To give this photo a tilt where its inclined at a 11:00 o'clock angle, I had to rotate the crop box to the left so that it was in a 2:00 o'clock position. Oh and make sure, you crop after doing other modifications like adjusting levels, curves etc. Go on and give it a try. Its easy ! As for the dreamy look, I'll cover that in another post.