Here’s one from the vault — One of my readers, Stephanie Bunhc, asked “Can you create presets for cropping?” The answer is: “…you sure can!” Here’s how:
STEP ONE: Open an image, and then click on the Crop Tool (BTW: one of my all-time favorite keyboard shortcuts in Lightroom is just to press the letter ‘r’ which jumps you directly to the Develop Module [no matter where you’re at] and activates the Crop tool]). Now, to the left of the lock icon; click and hold where it says “As Shot” and a pop-up menu will appear with a list of preset cropping sizes that come with Lightroom. To create your own, choose “Enter Custom” from the bottom of the menu (as shown here).
STEP TWO: That brings up the “Enter Custom Aspect Ratio” dialog box; just enter the aspect ratio you want (as shown here) and click OK. In this case, I put in 2.39 which gives you a cinematic-style wide screen crop.
STEP THREE: Now, that cropping preset you just created will appear in the pop-down menu, at the bottom of menu below Enter Custom (as seen here). There ya go, Stephanie. 🙂
Hope ya’ll found that helpful. Let’s have a great week everybody. Stay safe, be good to everybody; love your neighbor, and I wish you all good health.
-Scott
How about being able to name custom crop sizes like other editors. Having the ratios as numbers by themselves is not that useful. I would like to name crops like facebook horizontal, facebook portrait, Instagram landscape, etc…
[…] (the size of an output). The cropping pre-set menu in Photoshop is where you can create your own crop preset. In subtle and radical ways, you can change the orientation of an image. If you choose 180 degrees, […]
When doing an “Enter Custom” crop and I enter the 2 values for X and Y, the small number always ends up as the X value and the larger number ends up as the Y value, which makes the crop portrait orientation. It doesn’t seem to matter if I enter 1.8 in the left entry box and 2.1 in the right entry box or I reserve the entries and put 2.1 in the left box and 1.8 in the right box, I always get portrait orientation. I assume I’m missing something or making a mistake.
If the selected photo is in portrait orientation, then the custom crop will also be in portrait orientation at first. Likewise, if a landscape photo is selected when you first enter the custom crop it will remain landscape orientation. You can always flip the crop orientation by pressing X while in the Crop tool.
When using the crop ratio for cropping; it would be useful if LightRoom included as standard the most popular international paper sizes used by people to print their photos on their own printers i.e. A4 and A3. Alternatively, provide an option to save your own crop ratios with a meaningful label so we can set the up once and not have to remember which is the custom ratio we want to use.
How do I include my custom crop preset as a preset action in the develop module? It isn’t included in the list of settings you can use to make a preset.
You are correct. It isn’t possible to include a crop in a preset stored in the Presets panel. You can sync a crop (or use Auto Sync), but not include in a preset.
One handy crop trick I use is to hit the ‘x’ key twice which automatically gives me a 1.5 dx crop on my fx file.
There used to be the “X” (I think it was) keystroke – which just cropped an image in Develop module to whatever was the previously used crop – conceptually like “Export with previous.” Scott, could you please push Adobe on this. It’s a HUGE time waster not to have at least this most basic of functionality RESTORED to Lightroom.
Pressing X only ever rotated the crop orientation between landscape/portrait.
Each time I create a preset I loose one 🙁
LR should allow more than 5
Ted, I requested that from adobe years ago on their user forum. eg r810 would mean crop 8×10, r812 =8×12, etc.
Right? Those sizes are a bit outdated. Time to update them for digital sizes, I agree.
Several generations ago, Lightroom used to have a one-key shortcut to apply the previously used crop to a new image. Now, it is a pain in the rear end to have to go back to that crop box and use the mouse to select 1×1 or whatever. Is there a keystroke shortcut to apply a particular crop to an image?
Ted, I requested that from adobe years ago on their user forum. eg r810 would mean crop 8×10, r812 =8×12, etc.
I think it is Shift+A, no?