BackdoorArts
Senior Member
I shoot a lot of wildlife, and as such I've learned that you can only get so close, and more times than not you're going to need to crop your image to get your subject. For digital image sharing that's usually not a problem since sharing is usually done at 1000-1600px on the long side, and with 16MP and more on the original image even radical crops are OK. But, if you're shooting with the goal of printing your images at something larger than 4x6 or 5x7 then a radical crop can leave you with an image that will need to be upsized should your edit prove something you want to print, and in my experience any enlargement at that point leaves you with pixelated edges and other things you need to deal with. I ran into this when I attempted to take an edit I did 2 years ago of a Snowy Owl and print it as an 8x10 (my wife wanted an 11x14) - the original edit took the 4928x3264 D7000 image and cropped it to 978x1223, which is barely a 3x5. Everything I tried produced a decent at best 8x10 if you viewed it from 4 feet away, but at close inspection it wasn't clean.
I pinged my brother for help and he told me to send him the image and he should be able to clean it up. I asked him what his trick was and he said, "I just use Adobe Camera RAW. It's better than any tool out there at interpreting up-sizing." He explained how to do it and I told him I'd give it a shot. While it definitely worked better, it led me to go back to the RAW image and start from scratch to see if enlarging prior to editing would allow me to make an even better image. Sure enough, it did. Upsizing a radical crop before editing allows you work with an image that is either as large or larger than what you'll eventually print, so you can clean up what you need to clean up, and then resize down to 8x10 or 11x14, which is always easier when preserving details.
The following video explains how to do it. It should be noted, I left out a step where he recommended that you set the ACR sharpening to 0 before opening the image. It would see that the ACR function used to perform this enlargement is only available in the direct ACR interface. So, while Lightroom is essentially a fancy ACR engine, I've yet to find how to perform this enlarging step prior to sending the image to Photoshop. If I find it I will update this thread, and if anyone knows how to do it, please post a screenshot of where the setting is, because I've been looking.
This has me seriously rethinking my RAW editing workflow, which is Lightroom for basic adjustments and cropping and then off to Photoshop. Now I'm thinking that while I'll still use Lightroom for catalog management and basic edits, for photos that require some level of radical cropping (less than 50% of the photo) I may switch to this method, opening the RAW file directly in ACR and then sending it to Photoshop. When I'm done, I will import the resulting PSD file back into LR (a step that would have been automatic with the old work flow). The edit of the RAW file now also exists in a sidecar (XMP) file, and the next time I open Lightroom it will pick up the XMP file and update the preview to match what I did in ACR.
If you want to merge the XMP data into the LR catalog permanently, first remove the image from the catalog (hit Delete and then choose Remove - do not delete the underlying image!!), then use the Import function to bring the RAW file back into the catalog. The thing to note is that the re-imported preview will be back to the same size that you would have gotten from doing the edit in Lightroom in the first place. The resizing is done on the export from ACR to Photoshop.
I pinged my brother for help and he told me to send him the image and he should be able to clean it up. I asked him what his trick was and he said, "I just use Adobe Camera RAW. It's better than any tool out there at interpreting up-sizing." He explained how to do it and I told him I'd give it a shot. While it definitely worked better, it led me to go back to the RAW image and start from scratch to see if enlarging prior to editing would allow me to make an even better image. Sure enough, it did. Upsizing a radical crop before editing allows you work with an image that is either as large or larger than what you'll eventually print, so you can clean up what you need to clean up, and then resize down to 8x10 or 11x14, which is always easier when preserving details.
The following video explains how to do it. It should be noted, I left out a step where he recommended that you set the ACR sharpening to 0 before opening the image. It would see that the ACR function used to perform this enlargement is only available in the direct ACR interface. So, while Lightroom is essentially a fancy ACR engine, I've yet to find how to perform this enlarging step prior to sending the image to Photoshop. If I find it I will update this thread, and if anyone knows how to do it, please post a screenshot of where the setting is, because I've been looking.
This has me seriously rethinking my RAW editing workflow, which is Lightroom for basic adjustments and cropping and then off to Photoshop. Now I'm thinking that while I'll still use Lightroom for catalog management and basic edits, for photos that require some level of radical cropping (less than 50% of the photo) I may switch to this method, opening the RAW file directly in ACR and then sending it to Photoshop. When I'm done, I will import the resulting PSD file back into LR (a step that would have been automatic with the old work flow). The edit of the RAW file now also exists in a sidecar (XMP) file, and the next time I open Lightroom it will pick up the XMP file and update the preview to match what I did in ACR.
If you want to merge the XMP data into the LR catalog permanently, first remove the image from the catalog (hit Delete and then choose Remove - do not delete the underlying image!!), then use the Import function to bring the RAW file back into the catalog. The thing to note is that the re-imported preview will be back to the same size that you would have gotten from doing the edit in Lightroom in the first place. The resizing is done on the export from ACR to Photoshop.
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