Fix those awkwardly cut off limbs in your portraits with this quick trick
One of the very first things photographers learn during their venture into portraiture is properly framing the subject. Limbs should not be cut along the joints. When badly-framed shots still make the cut, we sometimes notice they’re actually not so bad if not for the awkwardly cropped limbs. A quick video tutorial by Pretty Preset for Lightroom tells us how to remedy this with a simple trick on our photo editing software of choice.
Let’s jump right into the tutorial below:
There you have it. With a simple use of the Crop function, we can save some of these portraits showing awkwardly cropped limbs. The key here is to make it a tighter crop, being careful not to cut off any other crucial elements. If there are any details that draw the eyes, the photo can also be cropped (best guided by the Rule of Thirds) to enhance the attention of those details. This way, we can end up with a result that looks more deliberate and creatively framed than accidentally cropped.
This trick works best for portraits with a lot of space around the subject so there’s more room to “move” the framing around without cutting off other crucial details.
In the example for this tutorial, we can see that the tighter crop looks a lot better than the original shot. By minimizing the space around the subject, our eyes are actually drawn to those adorable blue eyes which are easily the centerpiece of the portrait.
Need more post-processing tips and tricks? Go ahead and check out the Pretty Presets for Lightroom channel on YouTube for more of their Lightroom tutorials.
Screenshot image from the video by Pretty Presets for Lightroom
