Crop Image

Start from the destination, not the photo. Instagram feed posts can be anything from 1.91:1 landscape to 4:5 portrait, and 4:5 is the tallest, so it fills the most of a phone screen. Video thumbnails and widescreen slides are 16:9, stories and phone wallpapers are a tall 9:16, and a classic 6 × 4 inch print is 3:2. Matching the ratio here means the website or the print lab won’t trim your picture in a way you didn’t choose.

A crop is a second chance at composition. Placing the subject roughly a third of the way in from an edge, rather than dead centre, often feels more natural, and leaving a little space in front of a face or a moving object gives it somewhere to look or go. Cut close to lose a distracting sign or a stranger at the edge, but try not to slice through joints such as wrists, knees or the top of a chin.

Cropping removes pixels from the edges; it doesn’t shrink what remains. A 4000 × 3000 photo cropped square becomes 3000 × 3000, still far more than a 1080-pixel feed needs. To change the pixel dimensions, use Resize or set the output width in Export. Cropping hard into a small corner of a phone photo does leave few pixels, so check the result still looks sharp at the size it will be shown.

Inside the project, a crop can be taken back. Each layer keeps the pixels beyond the frame until you export, so enlarging the canvas later brings the trimmed edges back rather than leaving blank space. The history list also lets you jump to the moment before you cropped.

Straightening turns the photo by up to 45 degrees either way and shrinks the frame just enough to keep its corners filled. A slight tilt costs a thin border; a large one costs a good share of the picture, so fix tilt in the camera when you can.