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Question

Stitched Images - Scaling Down to Fit Crop?

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
September 11, 2023
2 replies
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All,

I often end up with stitched images when I'm doing athletics or landscape photography (i.e. taking photos of the crowd at a game, needing 3 to cover the stands at zoom before I pivot back to the football action). So, when I go to edit the stitched image, I want to typically use something like a horizontal 16x9 crop on such images, to capture maximum width.

Such images are, of course, huge, comprised of some combination of 36MP frames, thus one recent was 13080 x 5153 or about 68MP. What I want to do is reduce the size of the raw pano to allow me to fit a 16x9 (or other) crop on it; in essence, to zoom the image down to fit the crop.

I hope this makes sense. Thank you!

Windows

This topic has been closed for replies.

Conrad_C

Community Expert

In Lightroom Classic it’s straightforward to just set the Crop tool to 16:9 and then move the crop rectangle around to decide how much of each end gets cut off, which cannot be avoided because the aspect ratio of a 13080 x 5153 image is a lot wider than 16:9. The problem is basically the same as fitting an 8 foot long table in a 6 foot long truck bed…something’s gotta hang out.

Is your question about how to keep the entire image so that nothing is left out (so clipping off ends is not an option), and you require 16:9? Then you have several options, all of which involve taking the image to Photoshop:

Squeeze the image horizontally until it fits within 16:9. You probably won’t want to do this because of the obvious distortion.
Create a 16:9 document with a black background, drop the image into it, and fit its width to the canvas edges. If centered, it will have unavoidable black bars across the top and bottom.
Do the previous option, but in the Photoshop public beta, so that instead of leaving the top and bottom black or empty, you can use Generative Fill to have Photoshop make up something to fill in the necessarily empty top and bottom. Quality may vary.

Or am I reading the question wrong and you actually need something else?

J

JonathanAWatsonAuthor

Participant

Conrad,

I like the generative fill idea, and may use that as well. However, what I'm thinking / wondering about here is as follows - and I think your analogy clarified it for me.

Suppose what I have is an 8' painting and I'm looking at a 6' truck bed. What I want to do is shrink the painting, maintaining the image, proportionally, to fit within the 6' truck bed.

Similarly, shrinking my photo to fit within the 16x9 frame. Therefore, I can post it to things like Instagram without multi-posting it.

Does this make sense?

Conrad_C

Community Expert

OK. Here is one way to do it. In Photoshop, create a document at 16:9, at the pixel dimensions you want. Mine is 1920 x 1080 px. Create a background of the color you want, I chose a black Solid Color Fill layer. Then just add the image, and if the image pixel dimensions are larger than the canvas, it should scale proportionally to the canvas size*; you shouldn’t have to do anything except commit it (which you can also do with the Enter or Return key). Then you export that for Instagram.

I imported the image using drag and drop from the desktop, which is a shortcut for File > Place Embedded.

There may be a way to do this in Lightroom Classic by setting up the Print module with margins and then printing to JPEG, or by using a Lightroom Classic plug-in that adds borders. But I don’t do that very much, so I’ll leave those explanations to someone else.

*If it doesn’t scale to fit, enable the Resize Image During Place option in Preferences / General.

GoldingD

Legend

Cropping in LrC is not a dimensional edit, that is to say your 16x9 crop is not 16" by 9", it is just a ratio. Remember LrC is non destructive, cropping to actual dimensions so many inches by so many other inches, would be destructive and is not what is happening.

So, say you try to apply a 16x9 crop. And say the first view of that crop has space around it, above/below/left/right. Well, just use your mouse to click on a handle on the crop and expand it. You do not shrink the image to fit the first crop, no, you expand the crop to suit the image as you see fit.

some links:

Crop and straighten your photos

20 Tips for Cropping in Lightroom Classic.

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