Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements

Cropping for better composition

Cropping is an editing feature that allows you to trim off parts of the image that you don't like – essentially, it provides you with the opportunity to recompose the shot, after it has been taken. One vital thing to remember when cropping is that it discards pixels (and therefore lowers resolution). I love photographing birds, but unfortunately, they always tend to be too far away, even with a 400 mm telephoto lens, so I have to crop the file to make the subject appear larger. If I crop 50% from a photo, it then looks as if I have an 800 mm lens, not my regular 400 mm lens.

Cropping has saved me a lot of money in not having to buy an even more powerful (and thus expensive) lens, but in doing so, I lose half the ...