Cropping (image)

In the printing, graphic design and photography industries, cropping is the removal of unwanted areas from the periphery of a photographic or illustrated image.

Cropping is one of the most basic photo manipulation processes, and it is carried out to remove an unwanted object or irrelevant noise from the periphery of a photograph, change its aspect ratio, or improve the overall composition.

In certain circumstances, film footage may be cropped to change it from one aspect ratio to another, without stretching the image or filling the blank spaces with letterbox bars (fig.

Without this, widescreen reproduction, especially for television broadcasting, is dependent upon a variety of soft matting techniques such as letterboxing, which involves varying degrees of image cropping (see figures 2, 3 and 4).

Another option is a process called pillarboxing, where black bands are placed down the sides of the screen, allowing the original image to be shown full-frame within the wider aspect ratio (fig.