Cropping LRC

[vpchic]

I have a cute series of images with a moose in a pond dunking her head. I'd like to edit the images in a little series showing the movement. They are handheld images so a little different position in each frame. Is there a trick to cropping that would position the moose in the same spot for each frame? Wishful thinking? lol

 

[DRwyoming]

I have a cute series of images with a moose in a pond dunking her head. I'd like to edit the images in a little series showing the movement. They are handheld images so a little different position in each frame. Is there a trick to cropping that would position the moose in the same spot for each frame? Wishful thinking? lol

I'm not aware of a way within LR but I'd probably open the series of images as Layers in Photoshop (select all the images and use the Photo>Edit in menu from LR to open them all as layers in PS)

Once in PS I'd try an Auto Align from the Edit menu and if that didn't do the trick (might not with a lot of different shapes presented by the Moose as it drinks) then I'd lower the layer opacity on each layer and manually align them using the Move Tool (crossed arrows tool on top of the tool palette) to get the alignment you're after. Once you have them all aligned you can crop the entire layer stack with the PS crop tool to achieve the same crop on each image.

For output display and printing you could either paste each cropped and aligned layer onto it's own new image file and save them individually or you could increase the Canvas Size to create say a wide horizontal canvas and drag each layer horizontally into the desired left to right sequence or into a tiled grid like pattern again dragging each layer where you want it in a final single image that can be saved, printed, etc.

LR has added so many features it's possible someone can point you to a way to do this inside of LR but personally I'd move them all into PS and do the work there if accurate alignment was important. Of course if you don't need perfect image alignment you could just eyeball it within LR trying to get features like the ground and edge of the pond roughly the same from image to image which might be close enough.

 

[Nimi]

I have a cute series of images with a moose in a pond dunking her head. I'd like to edit the images in a little series showing the movement. They are handheld images so a little different position in each frame. Is there a trick to cropping that would position the moose in the same spot for each frame? Wishful thinking? lol

If you're comfortable with Premiere Pro, there is a hack you can use. Import the photos, track motion to keep it (say head) in the center, then crop and capture frames back. I use it for long sequences.

 

[bleirer]

Another vote for doing it in Photoshop. Ctrl-t gets you the free transform tool so you can grab a layer and move it around. If you turn on the ruler you can pull guides off the ruler to help line things up. If I understand your project you will have a base layer that includes the full background, then you will have a mask on each layer above to reveal only the parts you want to keep. Would need more details about exactly what you want to do to offer more specific advice.

 

[Replytoken]

Are you using grid overlays in LRC? That should help to a degree.

--Ken

 

[EricBowles]

I think Photoshop and Align Images is the right approach. The one thing to consider is aligning based on the background - not the subject. The background is not moving. Also - don't crop until after all images are aligned, and then crop based on the background and a standard size.

In LR, I'd crop all images to a standard size first, then manually nudge those images so the corners are aligned to very specific points - a blade of grass, stick, rock, etc. Aligning for any tilt could be challenging, so I would look for two corner points to make sure images were level and aligned. This is a manual process, but should be something reasonable.

 

[vpchic]

I'm not aware of a way within LR but I'd probably open the series of images as Layers in Photoshop (select all the images and use the Photo>Edit in menu from LR to open them all as layers in PS)

Once in PS I'd try an Auto Align from the Edit menu and if that didn't do the trick (might not with a lot of different shapes presented by the Moose as it drinks) then I'd lower the layer opacity on each layer and manually align them using the Move Tool (crossed arrows tool on top of the tool palette) to get the alignment you're after. Once you have them all aligned you can crop the entire layer stack with the PS crop tool to achieve the same crop on each image.

For output display and printing you could either paste each cropped and aligned layer onto it's own new image file and save them individually or you could increase the Canvas Size to create say a wide horizontal canvas and drag each layer horizontally into the desired left to right sequence or into a tiled grid like pattern again dragging each layer where you want it in a final single image that can be saved, printed, etc.

LR has added so many features it's possible someone can point you to a way to do this inside of LR but personally I'd move them all into PS and do the work there if accurate alignment was important. Of course if you don't need perfect image alignment you could just eyeball it within LR trying to get features like the ground and edge of the pond roughly the same from image to image which might be close enough.

Wow. This is awesome. I’m very comfortable in photoshop. I’ll do this. Thank you so much