PhotoWalkPro

Last week I read an article by photographer Jake Garn called The Lazy Rule of Thirds.  Instead of re-hashing the article I will let you read the whole thing at Jake’s blog but the quick and dirty was this; using the rule of thirds for composition is perhaps inferior to using something called a Fibonacci Spiral.  This is also sometimes referred to as the Golden Mean or Golden Spiral.  It is based on mathematical formulas, which provide order to much of the galaxy (seriously, I’m not making this up).

Fibonacci Spiral

Anyway, what I noticed from many of the comments after the article were wishing for Adobe to recognize this composition pattern and utilize it in Lightroom for the purposes of cropping.  Here’s the thing, they already have!  Most folks who use Lightroom don’t know that there are numerous choices available in the crop tool beyond the simple Rule of Thirds (referred to as Thirds).  In fact, there are 5 additional crop guides which include Grid, Triangle, Diagonal, Golden Ratio, and the Golden Spiral.

Golden Spiral Crop Guide

To select a different overlay (the Thirds is the default) go to the Develop Module and then select the Crop tool. While the tool is active, click on View on the top menu bar and then go down to Crop Guide Overlay. You can also cycle through the crop guides while the crop is active by pressing the letter O on the keyboard (not zero).

Changing the crop overlay in the menu

Related posts:

1. Saving the Shot with Lightroom 2
2. Lightroom Beta 3’s New Publish Feature
3. Anatomy of a Lightroom Beta 2 Image Correction
4. Urban Photography – A Path to Better Composition
5. Quick Image Prep in Lightroom

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 12:03 am and is filed under Lightroom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.