P: Crop to specific pixel dimensions

Thank you Johan, I'll looking to that.

No, it's not a fixed sized crop. I only stated crop to 3000 X 2000 as an example, because that is the last one that I did. Sometimes I may want to crop it to 5000 on the long side and 2000 on the short side, or any other size. It doesn't really matter "why" I'd want to do it that way, I feel no "justification" is necessary, for me, or for anyone else that wishes to do it that way. And no, it's not confining myself to a fixed size crop, I'd like to be able to do it that way for any size crop that best suits the subject. The problem with it being upscaled or downscaled is that the subject of the photograph is changed in size. I'll give you an example, which there are many others, but this one should suffice: say you want to compare it to another  photograph taken with a different camera with different megapixel count and you want to show, visually the size difference of an image taken from the same lens but on the two different cameras and you want to place the pictures side by side. For it to be an honest, fair and accurate comparison, the objects in the pictures "have" to be the exact same size after export, without being upscaled or downscaled. That's just one example, and it's not my main goal, but it should demonstrate the need for accuracy.

And yes, I do realize that pictures are resized quite often, I do it myself when I want to or have the need to. I'd also like to have the option of cropping it to a specific size without upscale or downscale for the times I want to do it that way. And from reading this forum and others, there are a lot of other people who have been asking Adobe for years to implment a way to do that, they just refuse to do it. Even though it wouldn't be that hard for them to do. 

Johan: on the question of WHY a specific pixel sized export may be wanted: when this is being done for purely technical purposes, analogous to cutting out standard sized physical fabric or wallpaper samples: retaining pictorial composition is not the aim - but avoiding any resampling whatever, may be.

I agree with another post, that the current best way to achieve that may be a deliberately oversized and imprecise LrC crop, exporting this 1:1 without any resizing, but then further trimming down to precise final pixel dimensions by another utility (called in on the fly, in the Postprocessing section of the Export settings). Once an export preset has been made that includes this action, this becomes a single click deal thereafter. It may be that the current LrC crop does not even need to be disturbed.

But why would you want the subject to remain exactly 1000 x 1000 pixels? That is the part I do not understand. Sure, you do not want to upsize it. That I get. But why would it be a problem if it gets downsized a little? That is my point. By making it mandatory that the subject is not resized, you confine yourself to a fixed size crop.

A 3000 x 2000 pixels crop is fixed in size. You can obviously move it around a bit, but you can't make it bigger or smaller to keep something in or leave something out, while keeping the composition of the photo intact. You can only do that with a fixed aspect ratio crop. That is what I meant when I said that you can't control that. If you move a fixed crop, you will change your composition. To me controlling the composition is far more important than not resizing.

Images get resized all the time. I work for magazines. I can send them a 2000 x 3000 pixel image, but if they decide to use that picture on one quarter page or half a page, they'll resize it. There is no way they can use the image at that size without resizing it.

Yes it is confusing and hard to deal with. It is possible, but only after 15 to 20 attempts to get the crop window to the size you want. I always set the info display to show the pixel size so I can see what size the crop will be after it's applied. It's almost impossible to drag the handles to the exact size, only after many frustrating attempts. To get the crop window to exact size is the only way to export it without resizing it in the export process. For example if your RAW photo is 6000 X 4000 and there is a square object in the picture that is 1000 X 1000 (or any other size) and you want to crop it and export it at 3000 X 2000, and you want that square object to remain 1000 X 1000 you can't just crop it to a ratio and then export it with the long edge at 3000 and get the desired result. That can only be achieved if the crop window/box is at 3000 X 2000 or whatever size the user want's to export the picture out as. Using ratios and then resizing makes this all but impossible to do quickly and efficiently.

Yes this is a potentially confusing thread. As I see it there are three basic facts.

• The Crop tool in Develop deals only with picture composition (angle, and relative position / extent / aspect ratio as a percentage of the overall image frame)

• Sizing happens only during output, and only TO the output never to the working image.

That working image is free to participate in any future specification of export, by acting as if sizeless and pixel resolution independent. Unlike Photoshop, which always requires e.g. some particular PPI to be in force.

• Export (with the exception of an image cell set to Zoom to Fill, in the Print module) respects whatever pictorial composition the current Crop has defined (which necessarily includes aspect ratio, but necessarily does not consider absolute sizing).

There are some tasks for which people often cite the above facts, as getting in the way.

IMO with some minor additions to the Export dialog, those aims could be met leaving things otherwise as they are and without changing the principle - or losing the other advantages - of how LrC cropping works.

The normal behaviour of Export is effectively "Zoom to Fit", preserving the Develop crop's pictorial composition (appearance) as a priority, even if the technical output specification will therefore not get filled.

I would add a "Grow to Fill" option, and a "Shrink to Fill" option: LrC would scale up and down as needed, trimming off excess picture content or adding extra where available... to accurately meet the aspect ratio implicit in your fully sized output specification..

Also, a "Centre on Crop" option, most useful when NOT resizing away from original camera pixel resolution. With this,  LrC would simply deliver what you ask for, as a fully sized output width and height - disregarding the size and aspect ratio of the current Develop crop, apart from its centre position and its angle. So if you wanted (say) an 800px x 600px image extract precisely, in 1:1 original pixel resolution, then that is what you would stipulate. It would then simply be unnecessary to make your Develop crop (somehow) include exactly that many original camera pixels wide and high.

just a thought... incidentally, such options would work only when both output width and height were given - and not with Longer Edge / Shorter Edge sizing.  

Quote, “I want to set the composition and place the crop exactly where I want it, and be able to export it without having to resize it upon export, which makes a lot more sense to me than just guessing at it and then exporting it at a specific size, which changes the whole picture because it will either stretch the image or downsize it.”

The first part is achiavable, however when you have placed the crop dimensions it will have encompassed a specific number of pixels from the original image and if you export without resizing the exported image will contain the exact number of pixels you had selected.

If you require your desired number of pixels then a resize will be necessary. Just my opinion.

If you require 3000 x 2000 then set the crop dimensions to 3x2 then adjust to position as desired,

Thanks for the reply Johan. You must have misunderstood my intentions. The 3000 X 2000 size I stated was just an example, not something set in stone. And as far as not being able to control the crop, well I don't understand what you're talking about with that because it's as controllable as any other method of cropping. That is exactly what I'm talking about, cropping to get a good composition. I want to set the composition and place the crop exactly where I want it, and be able to export it without having to resize it upon export, which makes a lot more sense to me than just guessing at it and then exporting it at a specific size, which changes the whole picture because it will either stretch the image or downsize it. And yes, it is an old request by many other people over the years. Why Adobe continues to refuse to implement a fix for this is beyond me. I really don't understand why anyone would want to do it any other way. Thank you for the link, but like I said in my original post, I'm not looking to buy a plugin. This is something that Adobe should implement in Lightroom natively.

The cropping in Lightroom is something I have a hard time with, maybe it's just me, I don't know. What I'd like to know is how to crop to a specific size in Lightroom. Not a specific ratio, but a specific pixel size. For example, my cameras pictures are a native resolution of 6000 X 4000, I want to keep the same ratio, but crop it down to 3000 X 2000 when it's exported, without scaling it up or down. I can find no way to do that. I can hit the i key and cycle through the info panel so it shows the size in pixels, but it's literally impossible most of the time to drag it to the exact dimensions, it'll be a little bit over or a little bit under. I don't want to just "get it close" then export it to 3000 on the long edge which will produce a 3000 X 2000 pixel image because that is going to stretch it or compress it. I want the objects in the picture to remain the exact same size after cropping and exporting. If you just "get it close" then export to a specific size which is easy to do, the objects in the picture will be either stretched or shrunk a little bit. If there was some way to make the crop tool snap to the guides like it will in photoshop that would work for most but not all sizes. Editing it in photoshop to do this is slow and time consuming and creates a huge tiff file when it's returned to Lightroom, so I don't want to have to do a lot of images that way. Does anyone reading this know how to do that, without buying a plugin? Doing it all in Photoshop is not an option either as there is no way to force Photoshop to export the exif data with the file. Lightroom is one of my favorite tools, and I use it daily. This is one of the very few issues I have with Lightroom. If Adobe would add some customizable guides to Lightroom and give the option of snapping the crop tool to the guides, it would be the perfect solution...

"I'm still puzzled why anyone would want to crop to a specific pixel size, instead of cropping to that particular aspect ratio and then resize to the desired pixel size on export."

Over the years, I've observed two categories of use-cases:

1. Some users needed a less-common aspect ratio, which older versions of LR would "snap" to a close built-in ratio. When they exported the photo, one dimension would be off by a small number of pixels, which could be a significant issue if the user's client demanded an exact pixel size (as they sometimes do).  The users would then express their dissatisfaction with this bug by saying they needed to crop to "an exact pixel size".

The bug, which was the original motivation for me to write the Any Crop plugin, was finally fixed in LR 8.1.  (An Adobe principal scientist had bogusly claimed that the bug was the result of inherent limitations of floating-point computation.) When I was writing the plugin, it was straightforward to allow users to crop by exact pixel size, and I've acquired a fair number of customers for that feature.

2. Some users want to export the photos at specific pixel dimensions but don't want LR to do any upscaling or downscaling of their image.  Two people in this thread explain their desires:

A) "Being able to crop to specific dimensions would allow you to create 100% (1:1) crops at a consistent size for blog or social media posts, whether lens reviews/comparisons, technique articles or just showing off the quality of a shot.  You could just crop to the desired dimensions, say 960x640, then export at full size."

B) "I post my photos to Flickr.  I decided that a max size I want up on line is a max pixel dimension of 3500.  When I photograph a bird, I want to crop to get the bird perfectly positioned in the frame (hard to do while shooting the bird on the fly).  So while I crop in Lightroom, I have to go back and forth with the cursor and *try* to get the crop box to be 3500 pixels.  Nearly (or completely?) impossible.  If it comes in at 3546, I'm not going to want an algorithm to reside down to 3500 during the export function.  That would damage the image and for only 46 pixels."

Rationale A seems plausible, though it's obviously a rare use case. For rationale B, I wonder how many images would in fact be visually "damaged" (noticeable to viewers without pixel peeping) if they were downscaled from 3546 to 3500 pixels.  Actual examples would be persuasive.