I use my new Apple iPhone 6 as a camera quite a bit and try to use the built-in zoom to capture just the subject I want, but sometimes there’s superfluous content. How can I crop my photos so when I post them they look better?
Over the last half-dozen or so iterations of the iOS operating system that Apple ships with its iPhones and iPads, the photo editing capabilities have improved dramatically. They’re not quite full-on Adobe Photoshop yet — but there is a version of Photoshop you can get from the App Store for your iPhone or iPad if you really want to go that route. Still, the default photo editor packs a lot of power in what seems like a photo browsing tool.
It’s all hidden under the unassuming “Edit” button on the top right when you’re viewing a photo in the Photos app…
Here’s a typical picture, one that definitely needs cropping:
I could post it as-is, but let’s tweak things a bit.
To do that I’ll tap on “Edit” on the top right. Now I see this:
The top left is the “magic wand” which applies various filters and adjustments to make the photo better based on Apple’s own algorithms about how it should look. It’s often quite good, but not always.
On the right (or, on a vertically oriented photo, along the bottom) are the crop/rotate button, the filters button (it looks like three circles) and the manual adjustments button (it looks like a dial turned to zero).
Each of them has powerful and important features to help maximize the appearance of your photos, but I’m going to stick with the crop feature. Tap on the crop icon (the topmost of the three)…
This is a rather funky display but I encourage you to play around a bit to see how everything works together. Tap the angles wheel and move your finger to adjust the horizon line, for example, if your picture’s not quite level or if you seek a view askance. The box on the top right with the arrow is a quick 90-degree rotation: tap it four times and you’re back to your original image. Very handy for fixing vertical orientation shots to horizontal. The lower button with the superimposed squares lets you pick specific aspect ratios, 2:3, 3:5, 3:4, 5:7, square, etc, if you want to quickly adjust the image to see how it’d look in a common photo print format.
All that’s great, but what I do for cropping is to tap and drag the corners of the displayed image because that’s a crop box too, one that starts out at full zoom.
Dragging it in shows you the new crop box:
After a few moments, it’ll actually zoom in on the new crop so you can see how it looks:
Good? Cropped the way you want?
Tap on “Done” on the top right and it’s saved in the new format, ready to share, post online, email, etc:
Not the greatest resolution with this tight crop from the iPhone’s camera, but still a definite improvement over the original image.
Hope that’s helpful!
Very nicely. I most often crop my photos like this: http://www.paintshoppro.com/en/pages/photo-crop/ using PaintShop Pro so I can preserve the quality of the image, but when I need a crop on the go, this is the way to go! 🙂 Nice blog you have here btw, many useful information!
By using this site, I cropped pictures online from my iPhone: http://imgonline.com.ua/eng/crop-image.php
There is still a lot of useful tools for image processing online like EXIF editor or auto-levels.