When I took this image, I thought of a tick in a checkbox, therefore the title.
Because April found “that you can only access the in-camera crop using Lightroom is a disturbing revelation”, I have to say I disagree. Most of the time I use a crop that’s different from Micro Four Thirds’ 4:3, and normally it’s square.
While using a DSLR with optical viewfinder, I ended up using the default 3:2 almost exclusively. The reason was that I compose for what I see. When I switched to the Panasonic LX5 (with the best aspect ratio switch that I’ve ever seen), it was a revelation. I could change between aspect ratios, and on the back LCD or in the electronic viewfinder I could also compose for them. Doing so, I discovered how much I like the square, and now my images have been mostly square for years.
I like it when my RAW converter respects my artistic choices. I like it when the automatic lens correction exactly matches what the camera does. This way I get exactly what I’ve composed for and my lines run into my edges as I’ve seen them do in the viewfinder. When I think of it, I find this behavior essential.
Then there are the many cases when I did not get it right in-camera, and the few cases when I can’t cheat with Photoshop to make it right. Normally we talk about lines and corners here. “Edit / Skew” is your friend, but sometimes even friends can’t help. Then it may be the time to search for a new crop in the RAW file or, better, throw away the image.
I don’t know why Lightroom does not allow opening up the whole sensor data. It’s definitely there, other tools can access it and there is no technical reason to bake aspect ratio. They simply do it.
Anyway. There is some workaround that involves a switch to Adobe’s own DNG converter (have not tried yet), you can always use the camera manufacturer’s supplied RAW converter (if there is one, for me it’s Olympus Viewer), or you can throw away the image. Normally I’d do just that 😄
The Song of the Day is Ray Charles’ version of “Yes, Indeed!”. I’ve already used it on this blog and therefore I’ve tried to like the Sinatra version, but no, sorry, I can’t 🙂
Hear it on YouTube.