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Changing a Photo from Landscape to Portrait through Cropping

Thursday, September 24 2009 by chrisb iPhoto

Getting the best composition

Landscape orientation with Portrait cropping <br>Click to see a larger image

Landscape orientation with Portrait cropping
Click to see a larger image

I am a big believer in cropping photos. Of course one could argue that if you focused on the composition of the shot before you took it, you wouldn't need to crop. Ok, agreed. But I think that many times, people are just taking snapshots and not thinking too much about the composition. The great thing about tools such as iPhoto is that you can make those composition decisions after the fact.

iPhoto makes cropping very easy. I'm sure you can do it without any help from me. But here is a little trick you might not have run into:

Portrait orientation <br>Click to see a larger image

Portrait orientation
Click to see a larger image

Sometimes a photo taken in landscape (wider than it is tall) would look better if it were cropped portrait (taller than it is wide) or vice-versa. Note that this is not the same as rotating an image. Rather, you are changing the orientation of the image.

The cropping tool has a dropdown box that shows different size ratios of photos. If you drop down that box, the last two items are Constrain as Landscape and Constrain as Portrait. Chances are, those two options are greyed out.

The trick is to select a standard photo size (for example 4x6 or 5x7) to constrain to. That makes the options to constrain to landscape or portrait become available. Select the option that will change the orientation of the photo. Then you can crop the image at that orientation.

Related Items: iPhoto | Crop

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Comments

Changing a Photo from Landscape to Portrait through Cropping | 1 comments

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Changing a Photo from Landscape to Portrait through Cropping

Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, December 09 2012

Thanks so much! I couldn't figure this out, and this so clearly explained the process -- greatly appreciated!

Reply to This | #

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