How To Work With Crop Overlays In Lightroon

This video tip by photographer Anthony Morganti demonstrates how to use crop overlays in Adobe Lightroom and use them to your advantage.

Many of us often crop our images either too make the composition better than the original shot or if we need the image to be different in term of size of aspect ratio. Crop overlays are helpful guides which are displayed on top of the crop area before you are actually cropping to help you get better compositions.

The most familiar crop overlay is of course the “Rule Of Thirds” which divides the image into 3 different sections, however there are other useful overlays that might be better suited for other types of images including golden ratio, golden spiral, and even simpler overlays such as a triangle, diagonal or even just a grid.

We do want to mention that you can find the same overlays in Adobe Photoshop as well under the crop tool and you can use the O to switch between overlays just like you do in Lightroom and can change the orientation of the overlay using shift O (again just like you do here).

We have been covering Morganti’s quick tip series of videos for lightroom users including his previous video “Lightroom Quick Tip – Changing Background Color Easily“, “Lightroom Quick Tip – How to Quickly Remove Distractions from Lightroom“ and more recently “How to Share Images From Laptop to Desktop in Lightroom“.

You can check out more useful Lightroom guides and tips on our LensVid Lightroom section.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.