cropping and maintaining proportions

[explody pup]

When you crop an image, do you just cut out what you want and leave it at that, or do you try to maintain the 6x8 (or whatever the case may be) proportions of the image? I can see the artistic merits of doing a square crop, for example, but what about if you have a series of images, all of which need some cropping and you want to maintain continuity?

I have some photos I like, but they only work well when they've been cropped quite a bit. They've been scanned at a high resolution so I'm not losing any noticable quality when I crop and resize... at least as far as my eyes can tell. But they're all cropped with different proportions and that's bugging me.

Anyway, I'm getting redundant.

How do you usually handle situations like this? Keep trimming till they're all proportioned the same or let each image stand on it's own merit? :?:

TIA.

 

[Digital Matt]

If my images look better from a crop, then I crop them, solely based on composition. If it's an irregular size for print, oh well. Time for a custom matte and frame

Many people have said this before, that you should let the print deterimine the matte and frame size anyway.

 

[vonnagy]

i agree with Matt on that one. However, if you really need to keep the proportions for some reason, in photoshop, click on the crop tool and the options for it should give the option for 'fixed target size'. Here you can specify the exact width in inches, cm, or pixels.

I've never used the fixed size for my own crops, but i've done heaps of web images for clients that needed to be fixed a certain size, so the crop tool comes in handy there.