One of the great things about applications on the web is that they can iterate faster than a mobile device application and much faster than a desktop application. That is why you often see advances moving more quickly in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom ™ for the web than you do in ‘for mobile’ and ‘for desktop’. For the bolder folks in the crowd, Adobe offers the ability to turn on Technology Previews where you can kick the tires on various features before they are released to the masses.
If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, you have access to Lightroom for web. Go to http://lightroom.adobe.com and log in with your Adobe ID. All of your previously synced pictures will appear along with some other goodies. (1) if you click on the Lightroom icon in the upper left, you will see a menu with options appear. (2) Technology Previews appears on this list. Click it.
Here, you will find a list of available Technology Previews you can activate and test out in your mobile workflow. On Wednesday, September 14, 2016, Adobe made available a new web-based feature called Suggested Crop. Click on the box and then on Apply Changes. Now, when you invoke the edit command on an image in Lightroom for web, you will get the Suggested Crop feature.
Here’s a quick screen grab showing the location of the new tool in the web interface.
Zooming in, you can see that a group of suggested crops appear. Clicking on them will modify the existing crop on your image. Sometimes, more than one crop will be available at a particular aspect ratio so remember to click each button a couple of times. This is a new technology that is analyzing your image and attempting to give you aesthetically pleasing crops following classical rules while matching the aspect ratio you need. You can still crop as you have always done but now have this new tool as an alternative.
Because it is a work in progress, your feedback is very important. On the Technology Preview activation screen is a place to leave feedback. Please do so!
While Suggested Crop might not give you a better result than your careful tweaking and retweaking, it is worth considering for quick down-n-dirty crops to fit a specific ratio. Give it a try.
Rikk Flohr © 2016
