On Mon, 25 Oct 2010 01:01 -0500, "Walter Gilbert" <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > [Insert standard mealy-mouthed plea for forbearance due to inexperience, > acknowledgment of fact that any photographer worth his salt should know, > and insistence that Google was not forthcoming with satisfactory > answers, here.] > > I've been doing all of my cropping with software rather than in-camera > since I started taking photos. A fair percentage of the crops I do are > pretty severe. But, it's occurred to me that I may be sacrificing IQ as > a consequence of that tendency, though I don't know. I've searched for > "advantages of in-camera cropping" and other similar key words, but > haven't been able to find any informative material with high relevancy > results. So, I figured I'd ask the Pentaxian Oracles. > > I've always just assumed that cropping in-camera does essentially the > same thing as cropping with software in post-processing. Am I right in > that regard? Or, does the camera perform the task better than, say, > IrfanView or some other basic image editor? > > My routine (admittedly redundant) has been to pull the HD card and cut & > paste the folder into my "Photography" directory, load them into Picasa > and save the original files (typically JPEG) as the "Picasa Originals", > then go about cropping for composition. I do my best to avoid cropping > any image down to anything less than 2400 pixels long-side from the > original 4288x2848. Once I've done my cropping, I resize them down to > two resolutions -- 2400 pixels long-side for prints and 1600 pixels > long-side for uploading and sharing (if I intend to do that with any of > the images). > > Am I screwing up by doing this instead of doing most of my cropping > in-camera, or is it six of one, half-a-dozen of the other? > > Thanks in advance for any guidance anyone can offer. >
I wasn't even aware that in-camera cropping was available. It's not on the K200D - seems to be a feature of more recent models. I struggle to see the benefits of cropping in camera but, assuming that you remove the same amount of image in both cases, I can't see that it would make any difference. It seems to me that in camera cropping is a bit of a time wasting exercise in the field - you might miss a great shot while fiddling about with cropping. In any case, cropping later would usually be done with more consideration as to the best aspect ratio and composition that suits the image. Cheers Brian ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://lyons-ryan.org/southernlight/ -- -- http://www.fastmail.fm - mmm... Fastmail... -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
