in this lesson, we're going to learn how to crop and rotate in adobe Lightroom, Classic CC. So select the photo that you want to edit. Then click the develop module tab up at the top. Now you have your adjustment options over on the right with lots of different menus that some are open because I've used those recently, but you can just open these different windows by clicking the arrow triangle on the right hand side of the title. And there's also some presets over here on the left hand side to adjust the size of your windows. Sometimes I'm just not using this stuff over here right now. So I'm gonna click this little arrow on the left hand side and then say I want even more room at the top and I don't need this menu up here. I can click this arrow and then if I just hover over it, I can click on it up there which allows me to have a bigger canvas for editing. Same here, I can click down to get rid of that tat that sort of tray at the bottom with all our photos. Okay, so to crop, you wa...

nt to click this little box that has like the dotted line around the edge, click that and that brings up our crop options. You'll also notice that sort of an overlay with corners that look like you might be able to do something with them by hovering over them. And also this grid which allows us to use things like the rule of three and to straighten horizons and things like that in an easier way. So this photo, it's a nice photo, it's a lovely background. Whoever that guy is looks kind of funny but it's kind of centered and awkwardly to the left of the frame. So I want to use more of the rule of thirds with this photo. So the easiest way to crop or the quickest is just to click and drag one of the sides or the corner and sort of drag in or out. You'll notice that right now the aspect ratio is locked to the original. So here's this little lock icon. If I unlock that I can drag this anywhere. I can make a super skinny photo. I could make it super wide and if I finish that. Alright so say I drag it, that kind of ends the cropping and then I can move my photo around in that crop this way when you're done you just click the done button at the bottom or press the return key on your keyboard but I'm not done because that's a really awkward photo and crop. You see now that this aspect is custom because that's what I created just by clicking and dragging. But if I click this custom menu you can see that there are different preset options for aspect ratio as shot which is usually what I leave and then I just zoom in or out or it's kind of like zooming in by dragging in and out and moving around Or I use one of these other presets like 1-1, which is a good aspect ratio for Instagram or 8.5 by 11, which is good for prints or five by seven, which is another common print size. You could even enter custom ones. Like I've done here with 1920 by 10 80 which is perfect for tv screens or mobile device screens. So you can create your own custom ones. I'm going to leave it as a shot but I'm just going to drag in slightly and try to put my face sort of more on that left line or maybe because I'm actually facing, I'm turned the other way. I might move myself over here just a little bit. Something like that. Try to get my eyes close to that intersection of these lines so that I'm following the rule of thirds. You can also rotate by hovering over the corner and dragging to the left or right if you want try to make my eyes more aligned or more parallel along the lines. You also have this angle which is cool. A cool quick way to adjust the rotation of an image as well. So say we're happy with that. I'm going to press return on my keyboard and now we have cropped it. Let me go find another image and I'll show you a really cool trick. Let's say this one of sam in the background. Okay, so in general you want to make sure that your horizons are are flat. This one's kind of tricky because there's mountains. So I'm gonna stick with this one even though this is not a horizon. This is a good example. If we go into our crop, click this sort of ruler tool, this level next to angle, what we can do now is drag along any straight line which typically would be your horizon. And then lightroom will automatically rotate the image so that's perfectly straight across your image. So that's a quick way to actually level any photos that have a horizon in it. Good trick to know. Okay, so let's go back to this photo and we are looking good with our crop and in the next lessons we're going to start editing it, fixing things like exposure, white balance and that kind of stuff too.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Course Resources

buy this class

$00

Buy Class

Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

79.7K Students

99% Recommend this Class

00 Student Work

0 Video lessons in HD
00h 00m of class content
Exclusive bonus content
Lifetime access, anywhere, anytime
Streaming access on desktop and mobile browsers
Download and offline access with class purchase
Offline sync with our iPhone & iPad apps
100% satisfaction guarantee

Philip Ebiner

Professional video & course creator, photographer & teacher to 1mil+ students; 10+ years experience with 1000+ videos.

2,000+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

Crop and Rotate in Lightroom Classic CC

Crop and Rotate in Lightroom Classic CC

Lesson Info

7. Crop and Rotate in Lightroom Classic CC

Lessons

Class Introduction

Importing

Organizing with Collections

Rating, Flagging, and Filtering

Face Tagging

Quiz: Importing, Organizing and Filtering