Crop Tool Problem

[George Dibble]

Hello all, I'm a brand-new (okay, about one week old) Lightroom user. I've found some very helpful tutorials and guides in my time researching and learning Lightroom thus far. I've run into a significant problem when it comes to using the crop tool, however. For some of my photos, as soon as I select the crop tool, the image stretches horizontally, and I'm unable to change the aspect ratio of the crop. At first I thought this was only happening to jpegs, but it seems to happen to some of my raw files as well. I can't determine any reason, though, because other files react as expected when I select the crop tool.

The problem doesn't resolve itself by exiting and restarting the program, or by restarting my computer. So I'm left with the situation that I simply cannot crop some images. Needless to say, I would love to solve this problem, and I appreciate any insight anyone might have. Thanks!

George

 

[Allan Olesen]

I think you will need to post some screenshots showing the photo before cropping and during cropping.

 

[davidedric]

What is the little padlock in the crop panel doing?

 

[Tony Jay]

What is the little padlock in the crop panel doing?

If the padlock is closed then the selected ratio is applied to any crop.
If the padlock is not closed then cropping to any ratio is possible.

Tony Jay

 

[George Dibble]

Okay, here are two screenshots. The first one shows the screen before I select the crop tool:

Here's one after I select the crop tool. It doesn't seem to matter whether the padlock is on or off, or what aspect ratio I select. It stretches the photo out. But again, it doesn't always do it. And it isn't exclusive to jpegs or raw files.

 

[clee01l]

You have changed the Aspect preset from "As Shot" to "Original" I think your camera must be creating a crop on your sensor. Which camera and what camera settings were used to take the shot? For most cameras, "As Shot" and "Original" are the same ~3:2 aspect ratio. in your case the "Original" sensor pixels are wider than the "As Shot" setting. Normally, "Original" would reveal more pixels than "As Shot" not distort the image, but distortion is what you are getting. And this part I can't explain. If you turn on Loupe Overlay to show the pixel dimensions, you should see a change in Pixel dimensions when you select the Crop Tool.

The next thing I would do to test to see if there is some "crop window refresh" bug in LR would be to grab a handle on the crop window and make it smaller. If doing this causes the image distortion to correct itself, then there might be a bug in LR5.4 that needs reporting.

 

[Allan Olesen]

The distortion seems very strange. (Or rather: It is a pretty easily explainable distortion caused by different scaling along the vertical and horizontal axes. But it is strange that Lightroom does it, since we have no user tools for applying such differentiated scaling.)

I think I sometimes see distortion like this for a few seconds if I have the crop tool open and switch between several photos which were already cropped. Lightroom has a strange habit of first stretching the contents of the cropped area out to the full size of the original photo, and then after a few seconds of rendering showing the correct photo. But I have never seen Lightroom do it if I stay on a photo and open the crop tool. And I have not either seen Lightroom do it permanently.

Was the photo cropped in the camera? A few versions ago, Adobe changed Lightroom's handling of in-camera crops, and I wonder if this could be an unwanted side effect from that.

 

[George Dibble]

I shot all the photos this has happened on (as well as the others that don't seem to have the problem) using a Nikon D7100. I haven't changed the crop factor from the standard DX format. The camera will allow for an additional 1.3x crop, but I wasn't using it on any of these photos. Also, I've tried selecting both "As Shot" and "Original" for the photos where this has happened, but it doesn't make any difference. As for cropping in camera, I haven't ever done that with any of my photos. I could see that being a problem, but that shouldn't be an issue in my case.

It definitely feels like a bug, because I also can't select any aspect ratios and get an updated crop frame. I also can't adjust the frame size by grabbing it and dragging it.

 

[Allan Olesen]

A stupid question from me:
When I look at the distorted image, it fills the available space in the Lightroom window pretty accurately. Is this a pure coincidence, or can you actually change the distortion by changing the height or width of the Lightroom window?

 

[George Dibble]

I can't say, unfortunately. It does that automatically, and I think if I understood how, I probably could then fix my problem. I've tried changing just about every physical dimension I can (including those of the Lightroom window), but nothing seems to make a difference to the distortion.

 

[clee01l]

What is the size of your monitor and it's native resolution? If you right click on the desktop and choose Screen Resolution, What values do you see selected?

 

[Allan Olesen]

What is the size of your monitor and it's native resolution? If you right click on the desktop and choose Screen Resolution, What values do you see selected?

1. Having different horizontal and vertical scaling on a monitor will not affect the scaling of a screen dump.

2. The ratio between vertical and horizontal scaling changes when he uses the crop tool. Using the crop tool will not change the settings of the graphics card or the physical properties of the monitor.

3. Only a part of the screen image get changed scaling. Again, this can't be explained by the settings of the graphics card or the physical properties of the monitor.

 

[Jim Wilde]

I've tried everything I can think of to reproduce this problem. I thought initially it might be something to do with the Aspect slider on the Manual tab of the Lens Corrections tool, but although it can be used to stretch the image in the same way as the screenshot, it only does that within the same bounding frame, not an expanded frame like the OP's.

So in the absence of a load of similar issues being reported, I'm wondering if doing a preferences file reset might be worth trying. Instructions are here.

 

[George Dibble]

I've tried everything I can think of to reproduce this problem. I thought initially it might be something to do with the Aspect slider on the Manual tab of the Lens Corrections tool, but although it can be used to stretch the image in the same way as the screenshot, it only does that within the same bounding frame, not an expanded frame like the OP's.

So in the absence of a load of similar issues being reported, I'm wondering if doing a preferences file reset might be worth trying. Instructions are here.

Jim, thanks for the tip. Since I'm a Lightroom neophyte, what does resetting the preferences file do? Specifically, which aspects of Lightroom will that influence. Also (and I'm not saying it will or won't, because I don't know), would doing the reset matter since this only happens to some of my images?

Thanks!

 

[Jim Wilde]

Did you read that post that I linked to? Explains a little, but put simply the preferences file is where your preferences are stored, i.e. any changes that you make to the default preferences (via the Edit menu>Preferences dialog) are stored in that file. But additionally, Lightroom also stores other stuff in there, such as the list of recent catalogs that you may have opened, and what state that catalog was in when you closed it, and probably a lot more.....resetting it (i.e. deleting it or renaming it) causes a new fresh preferences file to be created which will of course mean that any settings you changed will be back to default, plus there will be no memory of previous catalogs, and more importantly all the other "stuff" that Lightroom may have stored in there will also be gone (which is really the point, as it's that "stuff" which can cause the unusual and otherwise unexplained behaviours).