April 4 – Letter C – Scrapbooking Cropping Photos

I need to include cropping because it is a huge part of my scrapbooking.

C

C is for Cropping

When I first started scrapbooking I did way too much cropping of my photos. I wasn’t aware of all the reasons to not crop certain elements. This was way before digital images where you can return to the original if you make a mistake.

You should rarely/never crop a photo that is an only copy of a heritage picture. Decades ago, I  was given pictures of my grandfather in WWI. I wanted his picture and not his entire platoon. I cut the picture around him. I wish I had not done so.

I have only a few pictures of myself and my brothers when we were kids. i didn’t do a ton of cropping, but in hindsight, I should have done even less. I did know not to crop out items that showed the age of the photo. I have a picture of my aunt at Knotts Berry Farm in Southern California in 1945. The black and white photo is awesome. I did not crop it at all.

The purpose of cropping is to get rid of unnecessary objects or people in the picture. Cropping with digital pictures is much easier. You can enlarge a specific part of the picture to enhance the important features.

Cropping pictures allows you to add more photos to a page. I am all about using many photos on every layout. I take far too many photos to be one of those people who only put one picture on a page.

Unnecessary
Parts removed for clarity
Making the star shine