Thread: Question for Lightroom Users

I'm just getting started with it and I'm having an issue... Whenever I crop something, it totally kills my image quality. I couldn't tell it in the LR program, but I uploaded a few to facebook and the ones I cropped all came out REALLY grainy and horrible. Looked like I had to shoot them at ISO 8-million or something... Just really pixelated and gross. It was only on the ones that I cropped, and that was the only difference in processing from the rest, so I think that has to be what's wrong. But how do I crop and not have it totally kill my pictures?

ETA: I'm really liking lightroom so far for my purposes. I am NOT loving the crop tool here though... I much prefer the photoshop version. I'm not sure why they had to weird it up in LR...?

How much are you cropping down? If you crop too much and try to resize, it can cause some grain. But, if you're just doing a normal crop for composition and not loosing a lot of the image, it shouldn't make a huge image quality difference.

I always open in CS3 and crop there... Sorry, not much help here.

That's the thing... I wasn't cropping very much at all. I just had a little excess background that I wanted to get rid of from the top and right edges, but that's it.

I remember in photoshop where it would let you enter the resolution you want to crop to (or something like that, it has been a while since I used PS)... But I don't see anything like that in LR. I just can't figure out why this is happening, but it is BAD.

I second what Jennifer said on cropping too much! Are you cutting it down to "zoom" in on something? Are you keeping your aspect ratio the same? If you crop in too much, you're going to get a pixelated image, especially on a lower pixel camera. Also, FB is HORRID at compressing files! So I wouldn't necessarily use that to check your image quality.

There is no reason that cropping in Lightroom should create noise that isn't already there. Cropping in closer naturally enhances the noise that you see....but that has nothing to do with Lightroom...just cropping in general.

It's just weird because I'm not cropping any differently than I normally cropped in any other program (even paint, lol) and the image quality that I'm losing is seriously ridiculous (even by facebook standards)... I'll try to post an example tomorrow, like a side-by-side of cropped vs not cropped, so maybe someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong.

Could it be when you save the file? Maybe you are saving at lowest quality.

Holy moly.. So I still have no idea why it's doing it, but it is apparently just a thing with facebook. I uploaded the exact same files to flickr and they're fine. I know my quality isn't always the best on fb, but I'm not sure why it's handling these ones particularly poorly... MUCH worse than normal, and only on the ones I cropped (and just for the sake of argument, I redid it and told it to save it to 100% quality). I want to post a comparison for you of the fb ones vs the flickr ones just to show how bad it really is, but I have this new computer and the F5 button isn't working to get me out of that new "theater" view so that I can copy my picture from fb. That was the only way I knew how to copy from fb.

ETA: I still also find it odd that fb did fine with the other pictures in the same batch that I hadn't cropped. The whole thing is weird!

I ALWAYS resize my photos for facebook to 720 on the long side. This is the max FB allows. If you try to upload something with a longer side than 720, it compresses the file and will look horrible. This is part of my normal posting for web workflow.