andycivil's video: Crop image to specific pixel size in LightRoom without resize

If you want to crop a specific pixel size section out of a photo in LightRoom without resizing it, there's a trick that allows you to do it. A couple of years ago I did a video explaining how to crop a photo to a specific pixel size in Lightroom. It seemed to help most people, but I got a grumpy comment from petephoto735i complaining about a misleading title. It seems that Pete's idea of cropping is to leave the image at 1:1, in other words, he's keen that the part of the photo you keep is not resized. I'm not sure why this would be important, but I set about finding a way to do it, and at first it seemed that there is none. The problem is that when you crop in lightroom, it doesn't allow you to enter a crop size, nor does it give you any indication of what crop size you've chosen. You can choose a crop area freehand, and then export, taking care not to check the "resize to fit" box, and you'll get your section of the photo clipped without resizing. But that crop I just did was freehand, so the actual dimensions are not controllable. In the case of this example, I got 1844x1228. There seems to be no way to control this number - if you set up a crop and look around the LightRoom screen, it doesn't tell you that size anywhere. There is even a support request from Dan Taylor saying "Its well documented that you cannot crop to specific pixel dimensions and many people have asked this very question. Just google "crop specific dimensions in Lightroom" Heck even someone has built a plug-in to solve the issue." Well, to those who say it can't be done, I say "Rubbish". And I'll show you how to do it. Let's go with Pete's request to snip a 640x480 chunk out of a photo. Here's my cat, awesome fellow Nico. My Canon T2i photos are 5178 x 3456 pixels, and I want a 640 x 480 crop. There are two calculations I need to do. First, I'm going to create an empty image which is as wide as my crop (640) and as tall as my original (3456). The reason for this strange request will become apparent very soon. I also need to work out the aspect of my crop. In this case 640 x 480, as a ratio, simplifies to 4 : 3. You can use any graphics program to create an empty image, in my case I used PaintShop Pro but you could probably even use msPaint. Save the image. In LightRoom, go to your library, and import that image into the folder you're working in. Now, go back to the 'develop' tab, and open your empty image. Press the 'R' key to start the crop tool. Go to the aspect ratio control and select 4:3 (the aspect we want for our crop). In this case the program chose portrait instead of landscape, presumably to match the orientation of our original, but we can press the 'X' key to switch it the way we want. Can you see where I'm going with this now? LightRoom constrains the crop to be as wide as the image it's working on - which we have constructed to be 640. So together with the aspect ratio we know that the crop is 640 x 480. But the crop is of the wrong image. No problem! In the bottom left corner there's a 'Copy...' button. This button allows you to apply the same changes you made to one image, to another image. Here's the magic. Select only the crop settings, and hit 'copy'. Go to the image that you want to crop. Choose 'Paste'. We now have a crop that is exactly the size we want. As you move your original underneath to select your framing, take care not to change the size. And when you choose "Export" make sure that "resize to fit" is not checked. Now let's have a look. There we are, 640 x 480. Let's hope that makes Pete happy.