WHAT TO REMOVE (CROPPING)

Sometimes you just grab the shot and have no time to crop it in camera, but you like the ambience of the moment.
Take this gondola in Venice as an example. I took this from the Ponte Rialto as the gondola emerged beneath me. I liked the highlights and colour,
so I decided to under expose it. I knew that I could remove the unwanted visual information later. If id waited the second gondola would have eclipsed this one and it would have looked confusing. You can see that the cropped excess information has no impact on the central subject, so it can go. Simply by the fact that it is a gondola kind of tells us where it is!

There are two main ways of doing this. Let’s say the original image is 30cms tall @ 300ppi and you wish to keep this ratio.
1. If you crop it in Photoshop or another app using a crop tool, you will reduce the actual size of the image (see 2 below) to say 25cms tall.
2. If you wish to keep the megapixel count the same, in Photoshop, you can unlock the layer and then enlarge (Transform) it within its actual dimensions (See 3 below) of 30cms.

1. Original as taken

2. The unwanted visual information to crop

3. The final image optimised

Here are screen grabs of the two options

1. Original frame 30cms @ 300ppi

2. Cropped, note the file size change

2. Cropped area

3. Image transformed (enlarged), note the file size.

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