What's the problem with cropping?

[deepend]

Hi all, my 1st post in here.

After taking a typical closeup shot of say, a bug, I'd sort of crop away the areas I don't like, or are just wasting pixels, and then resize to a size suitable to where I'm uploading later.

For instance, to upload to FB on my laptop, I notice that I need about 1100 pixels to get full width on FB, so I will always resize the cropped photo down to a width of 1100 +/- 100 pixels.

But I hear many ppl talking about uploading uncropped photos, to maintain the image quality, etc etc. Is what I'm doing totally wrong?

Another example of just pure resizing is when a pic is framed OK (by my low standards), but size is more than 5K x 3K pixels. I'd simply resize it down to again about 1100 by whatever the program calculates the height to be. Again, is this the wrong way ?

I don't want my uploading to FB or wherever to take the whole night.

Thx

[calvincychin]

The picture in facebook are displayed based on screen size. if you resize it to 1100 it might fine viewing on 13" laptop but it maybe soft viewing on 24" monitor. I think that is why your friend should upload a big file to facebook.

However, facebook do accept up to some limit of file. If they see the file is too big, fb will help you to resized. I normally let facebook do it as I don't want to do the resize myself... I don't upload >100 image so normally I only leave the computer while I go to shower...

If not mistaken, FB do accept higher resolution files but I got a feeling that facebook is cutting out file recently to allow more picture to be stored for the amount of storage they have.

there is no right or wrong is only preference.

[deepend]

Thx for the reply, Calvin. Hmmm and some ppl say that after I resize, I should resharpen the pic, is this normal? I don't like my pics to look obviously sharpened, so I try not to sharpen as much as I can. Will the Unsharpen mask actually bring back the edges I might have lost due to JPG compression?

[calvincychin]

It depend on what algorithm you use to resize the photo. Whether you size up or size down. if size down, I think shouldn't be big problem. If you size up, I think you need to do some sharpening. I prefer to use Perfect Resize to do the job.

[deepend]

Well, I've always sized down, and if an image is not big enough, I just throw it away

[photogenius]

it reduces the quality of the original picture

[photogenius]

did you try cropping any picture?

[deepend]

Most of the time I need to crop out the parts I don't like first. Depending on the subject, this may end up with a 50% reduction in size. Then if it's still bigger than my monitor size, I'll reduce until it can fit in.

[dnl8868]

Don't restrict your creativity into thinking what is right or wrong.

Make the pix the way u like it, and enjoy it.
- do whatever u need: crop it, resize it, sharpen it, rotate it, ..whatever!

so long the pix is nice/good to your eyes, be proud of it
- its your own creativity and your way of expressing your art


Secondly, the resizing for uploading to fb etc.
- yeah, i faced similar issue too
- i do it so that it doesnt take too long to upload
- yes, my pix will appear bit soft after resizing.. but it doesnt bother me much

[deepend]

Thanks for the comments, DNL