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Participant
April 4, 2012
Released

P: Enable Zoom with Crop Tool

  • April 4, 2012
  • 145 replies
  • 13678 views

This may have already been suggested, but it would be nice if the zoom feature in Lightroom 4 could be enabled while using the crop tool to make refined adjustments to the crop area. At present, there is only a clumsy work-around using the secondary display for refined crop adjustments.

145 replies

Participant
February 19, 2025

Bumping this thread up. It's been almost 13 years since the thread was started, and we're still squinting when cropping.
Most phone apps zoom in to fit as you crop. This needs to be a thing in LrC!

Bob Somrak
Legend
October 17, 2024

@Scott_Martin_ 

 

I agree.  The same magnifier tool that is in transform would be great. Adobe hass definately been ignoring this feature request for a LONG time.  

M4 Pro Mac Mini. 48GB
C.Cella
Inspiring
October 16, 2024

@Russell Proulx 

ACR demands users to drag handles to cop.

Adjust Crop instead uses sliders ( a limit of the SDK that does not allow any control on the LrC UI)

This said those sliders offer many advantages.

For instance you can crop and zoom in /our and crop without having any distracting UI to deal with AND only visualising the current crop.
ACR doens't allow that.

If you think that's not good you can then spend your time to open the image in ACR just to crop.

This request has been standing for 12 years now.

@johnrellis provided a solution tha tis only limited by what the SKD allows.


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Known Participant
October 16, 2024

I'll have a peek again at that plugin but I seem to remember it was nowhere near as good as what ACR provides.

 

But we should not have to use a 3d party hack to provide something as basic as being able to view cropping at a higher magnification. If it works so well then why doesn't Adobe just pay the author for their efforts and add it to a LrC update?

 

Just keeping this thread alive 😉

Known Participant
October 16, 2024

Agreed everyone. I have a thought - and maybe this is easier than Abode realises. You know how the magnification Loupe comes up ajacent to the cursor when using The Guided Tranform? That's what we need for cropping. A loupe option that allows us to see the whole image but also full res detail for precise crop placement. If we could mouse around with this loupe and check placement with the existing crop that would be ideal. Thanks for listening!

C.Cella
Inspiring
October 16, 2024

@Russell Proulx 

If you need to crop when zoomed then you can use the "Adjust Crop" command provided by "Any Crop" Plug-in: https://johnrellis.com/lightroom/anycrop.htm

 

The author is @johnrellis 

No need to journey to ACR.


Known Participant
October 16, 2024

I just updated to the latest versions of Bridge, ACR and Lightroom and continue to be disappointed that there is no native ability to zoom in on images while cropping in Lightroom whereas the zooming while cropping in ACR works perfectly. After cropping using Bridge/ACR I then need to use Read Metadata from File to update it in LrC. That has me wondering if there's a way to use ACR to perform edits (such as Cropping) while within Lightroom.

 

This would be a feature request to allow users to edit original images (not Virtual Copies) displayed in the Library using ACR in the same way as from within Bridge. While Lightroom's Develop Module is built on ACR the crop behaviour is nowhere near as precise (one can enlarge up to 1600% while cropping with ACR). For some workflows it might be useful to have temporary access to ACR and Read Metadata from File would be automatically applied when returning to LrC. Just a thought .... 

 

Or just fix the crop tool in LrC 😉

 

R

JBedfordPhoto
Inspiring
September 2, 2024

@Scott_Martin_  I posted this as a new topic but an admin merged it with this thread

Community Expert
September 2, 2024

To be clear, cropping is dimensionless so IMO selecting particular absolute pixel zoom factors such as 1:1, might be a bad usability fit in principle. Because when we sync a given crop across two photos of different resolutions, the sync is purely of pictorial composition and has nothing to do with individual pixels. 

 

But one might nonetheless, without doing any violence to the underlying 'dimensionless' concept, want to magnify / reduce by a certain relative amount compared with Fit view. Say, go to 50% of Fit or to 200% of Fit. As noted already, that is a matter of achieving compositional accuracy not of achieving pixel accuracy. 

Known Participant
September 2, 2024

Respectfully, this thread isn't about performance, it's about the need for accuracy when cropping. When one is working with 150+ megapixel files the crop tool, as is, is horribly innacurate. We need to be able to zoom in and see the entire image so that we can crop accurately.