Crop

Cropping in RawTherapee does not discard the cropped-off area, it just hides it by drawing a crop frame and zooming in to fit the frame to the available screen space. You can still see the cropped-off area in the preview if you zoom out and set the background color of the preview to “theme-based”. The cropped-off area will of course not appear in the saved image.

Editor

When you set the background color of the preview to anything other than “theme-based” then the cropped-off area will be completely hidden from the preview, but if you set it to “theme-based” then by default the cropped-off area will be covered by a dark but semi-transparent mask. You can define the color and transparency of this mask in “Preferences > General > Crop mask color/transparency”.

Activate crop-placing mode by clicking the “Select Crop” button in the tool panel, the button in the Editor’s top toolbar, or the appropriate keyboard shortcut, then create the crop by clicking and dragging over the preview with your mouse. Use the Shift key to move (pan) the crop over the image. Resize a crop by placing the mouse on one of the sides or corners. To clear the crop, activate crop-placing mode again (via the keyboard shortcut or either of the buttons mentioned above), and click anywhere in the preview without dragging. To see only the cropped area, use the “Fit cropped area to screen” keyboard shortcut.

Use Guide Type to select popular guides to help you in composition while cropping, and a horizontal (landscape) or vertical (portrait) orientation. By default, RawTherapee automatically detects and uses the same crop orientation as the orientation of your image - the “As Image” option.

The PPI value (pixels per inch) does not change any physical property of the image, it only serves to help you see what physical size the current crop would print at using that PPI value.

Aspect Ratios

Custom crop ratio

You can make a custom crop ratio as of RawTherapee 5.1.

1. Disable “Lock ratio”,
2. Make a crop, use “Width” and “Height” values to define the ratio, e.g. to make a crop using a 5:4 ratio set width=5 height=4, or width=1280 height=1024.
3. To resize the crop while maintaining the custom ratio, hold the Shift key while dragging the edge or corner of the crop frame with the mouse.

Fixed crop ratio

Use “Lock ratio” to set the crop to a fixed ratio.

• 3:2
  • Classic negatives have this ratio, as do APS-C DSLR cameras.
• 4:3
  • The Four Thirds System.
• 16:9
  • The 1080p and 720p high-definition video format, and due to this the most common computer monitor aspect ratio since 2010.
• 16:10
  • The most popular computer monitor aspect ratio between 2005-2009. Still popular in tablets.
• 24:65 XPan
  • Hasselblad’s medium-format cameras.
• 1.414 DIN EN ISO 216
  • Standard paper size ratio such as A4, B5, etc.
• 8.5:11
  • The US Letter size.
• 11:17 - Tabloid
  • A common tabloid newspaper format.
• 45:35 - ePassport
  • Guides to help you crop a portrait for a biometric passport. Official measurements do not specify exact ratios, just min/max measurements within which the eyes and chin-crown distance must lie. The guides represent the averages of those distances. The first horizontal guide is for the crown, the second is roughly for the nostrils, the third is for the chin. “On the photo, the face must be between 29mm and 34mm from the bottom of the chin to the crown (the top of the head, not the top of the hair).” [1].

Crop Guides

Crop guides provide overlays for commonly used composition patterns like the Rule of Thirds. The overlay is only active when the Crop tool is enabled. While the crop tool is enabled, the overlay can be shown/hidden by enabling/disabling the crop guide tool.

Enabling the crop guide tool will draw a marquee frame around the crop by default. This behavior can be changed in “Preferences > Image Processing > Guides shown when not editing the crop”.

Composition guides can be enabled individually. Multiple crop guides can be enabled at the same time by using Ctrl + Click. Use the color picker button to set the color of the guide type.

Use the Rotate, Mirror, and Reset buttons to control the orientation of the golden triangles golden ratio composition guides.

Inscribed Aspect Ratio Guides

If an image needs to be cropped for multiple aspect ratios, inscribed aspect ratio guides can be used. Select the desired aspect ratio from the dropdown. A guide for the selected aspect ratio is drawn to fit the current crop. Use the Rotate button to control the orientation of the aspect ratio.

Bleed

The print bleed option adds padding to the crop guides inside the user’s selected crop. In Scale mode, the padding is a percentage value of the crop dimensions. In Width, Height, Long Edge, and Short Edge mode, a uniform padding value is used based on the length of the chosen crop edge.