Cropping: 100% vs partial?

[Snydremark]

Ok, so I see a lot of talk about partial crops and 100% crops...but I don't understand how you can have a 100%. How does this work?

[Scottes]

A 100% crop is a crop showing the pixels at actual size, ie; 100% zoom. Say I crop a 400 pixel by 400 pixel area out of an image, save that 400x400 to a JPG, and post it here. That's a 100% crop.

A partial crop could be anything - there doesn't seem to be standard terms for any of the other crops. So a partial crop could be an image that has had a small amount removed, or it could an area from an image but not the whole image, and it could mean other things.

[Snydremark]

But, if I crop anything out of a picture it's going to be whatever size it is...How would you crop a 400x400 area out of a picture and have it show up as anything BUT 400x400? There's SOME part of that that I'm just not clicking on...

[Grimes]

But, if I crop anything out of a picture it's going to be whatever size it is...How would you crop a 400x400 area out of a picture and have it show up as anything BUT 400x400? There's SOME part of that that I'm just not clicking on...

You are not missing anything. A 100% crop would be anything that you did not enlarge or shrink. Most people give crops that fit onto a computer screen set at a "reasonable" resolution.

[tkbslc]

The term 100% crop is pretty misleading. 100% crop would be 0x0 pixels, wouldn't it? It should probably be called "a crop of actual pixels not resized". It is just any crop that when displayed or posted is not resized at all.

here's an example I posted to the Sigma 30mm thread. It shows the full image resized, and then a crop from the unresized image. That small crop would be called a 100% crop.

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showpost.php?p=8470858&postcount=1582

[Snydremark]

Ah-HA! <click>

Thanks! :cool:

[teamB_macro]

Sometimes cropping a picture can improve it dramatically whether it's a 100% or partially.

[Digital_zen]

I took a pitcher of a been crop, they was only at abowt 60% thow. :-)

[hollis_f]

I shoot an image at 6000x4000 pixels and crop out the central 3000x2000 pixels. I then resize the cropped image to 1200x800 pixels for web display - it's been resized to 40% of its original size. If I crop out the central 1200x800 pixels then I can display it on the web without resizing - it's 100% of its original size. So it should really be called a crop with 100% resizing.

[chauncey]

To show a 100% crop, I use a marque tool to crop out a specific number of pixels, usually around 900x900 pixels then convert to jpeg and post.