1×2, 4×6, 5×7, 8×10, and on and on it goes. An excellent article by Liz Masoner points out that 8×10 is generally the most common “squarish” crop, and the others either match its rough ratio (1.25) or can be cropped from it.
What that means is that I’m probably going to make 8×10 my standard ’size’ and know that if the composition works there, I can crop into any other size. The “standard” nikon ratio (which I get when a photo is first imported into my software) is too long and narrow. Which is a shame, since I like some of the pictures with that long and narrow ratio- but there’s no easy/standard way to print them out that way without a lot of wasted paper/space.
This also brought up an annoying feature/bug in Lightroom – if you’ve cropped a photo to ANY ratio, and change the crop ratio, LR unhelpfully ignores what you done and makes the crop the largest possible crop with the new ratio. What I would prefer is that it held to the center of the old crop and preserved the size of the old crop as closely as possible under the new ratio. You’d invariably STILL have to adjust things, but you wouldn’t be starting over blank.
As a work-around, I create a virtual copy of the existing photo/crop (with cmd-’ on a mac) so that I have a visual reference to go by. Then I change the ratio on the “master” (the thing the virtual copy came from). LR blows the crop out to the maximum, but the virtual copy is unaffected. Then I can re-adjust the crop on the master using the VC as a reference. Once I’m happy with the master again, I delete the VC.
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