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Lightroom Crop Madness
Ok, here’s a question that has me stumped. Maybe someone out there has an answer, The question comes from Eric Charles, directed to me on the ASMPNorCal Lightroom forum. He wonders if there is a way to set a specific crop ratio as a default in Lightroom's Develop module.
Here is how he puts it:
"What I need to do is set a *default* crop to 8x10 so when I hit the shortcut key "r," the crop goes to that aspect ratio without my having to use the little pull-down menu in the crop control and choose 8x10 for each image.
Is that possible?
I know how to crop an image and sync others to it, but since not all my images get cropped or cropped the same way that isn't practical for my workflow.
I also see that in the main "settings" menu there is a choice for "Crop to Same Aspect Ratio" with a shortcut key "s." I have no idea what this does. I can be cropping to 8x10 all day and hit "s" and it puts me right back at "original" (which for my captures is 8x12). "
Seems to me that it would help if the crop controls were "sticky". Sticky in the sense that your last setting would be remembered. But they aren't. It would also be nice if you could make a LR preset that only contained the crop ratio setting, but you can't.
So.. does anyone out there have an answer for Eric? Or should we just put this on our wish list for the next rev?
The quickest way to apply a crop to a bunch of images is to select them and then use the Crop Ratio preset tool in Quick Develop to apply a crop to them. If you can't see this tool, click on the black triangle to the right of the 'Saved Preset' menu.
Now this only applies a centered crop and needs moving, but at least it's the right ratio.
Hey Sean, thanks for posting. Must be early morning in England (or is it Scotland?). Anyway, I know what Eric will say: "But I still have to go through the pop-up menu each time to find my desired ratio." He wants a way to make a new default. There is no way to do this, right?
I don't know if this helps, but when I'm going through my finals from a wedding and cropping a lot of them to 5x7 I've found that if I don't hit 'Enter' or click 'Done' after each crop, LR saves the crop nonetheless but leaves the cropping viewport open for the next image still set at the same aspect ratio.
You can copy the develop settings and apply them either directly or save the develop settings as a template.
Like Sean mentioned, but from develop:
If you select all and then crop the active image, the same crop is applied to all selected images. I've had this happen when it wasn't desired and been surprised to see the thumbnails all magically change shape ..
Most definitely Ireland.
John Beardsworth would say West Brit... While I did attend a 'West Brit' college (Trinity College Dublin), I'm not one of them!
I've been requesting that Crop can be saved into a preset, but in truth it's exactly one menu click to get it to all the images, which is what applying a Develop Preset takes.
For the person that mentions Crop syncing to other images in Develop, this is only true if you are in Auto Sync mode, or if you press Sync.
An Irish friend did tell me it was a great way to wind up those living beyond the pale.....
I'd love this feature as well. It's less selecting a bunch of images and doing something similar to them, it's more being able to make the pull down default to something of one's choice (still leaving the other choices of course).