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Crop and geometry

Crop

Press C, or click the Crop icon in the icon bar.

  • Drag a corner or an edge: resize the frame.
  • Drag inside: move the frame.
  • Drag outside the frame: rotate the photo (the frame stays straight). While rotating, a fine grid helps you align the lines of the photo with the frame.
  • Aspect: Free, Original (the photo's own, the default), 1 : 1, 3 : 2, 4 : 3, 5 : 7, 4 : 5, 16 : 9. The ↔ button switches between landscape and portrait.
  • Overlay: a composition guide drawn in the frame: Thirds, Grid, Diagonal, Triangle, Golden Ratio, Golden Spiral. O moves to the next one, Shift+O (or the ⟲ button) changes the orientation of the triangles and the corner the spiral winds into. Your choice is kept from one session to the next; during a rotation, a fine grid replaces it.
  • Straighten: rotation angle in degrees (double-click to go back to 0).
  • Auto: levels the photo based on its lines, keeping the frame as large as possible: the verticals of a building (even when shot with the camera tilted up, when they converge), otherwise a clear horizon, otherwise the horizontals of a façade seen head-on. Without a clear enough reference (portrait, nature), Auto doesn't rotate the photo and tells you so: then draw a line with the Straighten Tool.
  • Straighten Tool (or Ctrl + drag): draw a line on the photo that should be horizontal or vertical; the photo rotates to straighten it.
  • The crop dimensions in pixels are shown below the slider.

Enter or Done confirms, Esc cancels, Reset goes back to the whole photo.

Geometry

The Geometry submenu of the Optics section (Edit panel) corrects perspective, for example buildings that "fall backward" when shot from below.

Straightening does it in one click based on the lines of the photo:

Button Correction
Auto balanced: level and perspective, without overdoing it (a façade seen at an angle stays that way)
Level leveling only
Vertical level, and verticals made parallel
Full level, verticals and horizontals
Guided draw 2 to 4 lines along verticals or horizontals in the photo: they are straightened (Esc to finish)
Off cancels the correction

Straightening sets the sliders below (Vertical, Horizontal, Rotate) and the Scale, so that the photo fills the frame with no white border: the result remains editable. The button of the current correction is outlined (Off when there is no correction), as long as those sliders haven't been touched. Turn on the lens corrections first: they straighten lines bent by distortion.

A correction is applied only if it clearly aligns more lines in the photo: on a portrait or a landscape, with no architectural lines, Straightening says so and changes nothing (the same goes for a photo that is already straight). Even Full corrects horizontals only when they warrant it: a façade seen at an angle stays that way.

The sliders:

Slider Effect
Vertical straightens converging vertical lines
Horizontal the same for horizontal lines
Rotate rotates the image
Aspect stretches or squeezes the image horizontally
Scale enlarges or shrinks the image within the frame
Offset X / Y moves the image within the frame

The lens corrections (distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration) are in the same Optics section (see The Edit panel).