The other day I needed to shoot some photos that would be used at a 4x5 aspect ratio. I was shooting with a 5DIII and I decided to use the "Add Cropping Information" feature for the first time. Initially I thought it was awesome to have the guidelines right there on the screen to ensure I was leaving enough room for the crop. I assumed they were only guidelines and re-adjusting the crop would be a simple task in ACR once I was finished (the image preview on the back of the camera even shows the entire 2x3 photo with 4x5 guidelines drawn in). The bad news is that Adobe Bridge/PS/ACR will only display and allow you to work with the image as it was cropped in camera so dragging the crop up or down for more precise framing is impossible. As far as I can tell, there's no simple fix for this issue (I did see a beta Lightroom plug in that claims to recover the lost cropping information after converting them to .dng files, but I do not have nor use Lightroom). It amazes me that Adobe has decided to have their software operate in such a manner with RAW files.
On the good side of the equation, DPP does exactly what I assumed ACR would do. I can open the file in DPP, go to the crop tool and see the entire photo and adjust the crop as needed but, even when you adjust the crop in DPP and re-save as a .CR2 file, Adobe software will not recognize the cropping change and still will only display the original camera crop. The files need to be exported into a different format in DPP after adjusting the crop (for instance, a TIFF), only then will Adobe software acknowledge the new crop. Personally, I prefer to work with my .CR2 files in ACR, so if anyone knows a work around that I may have missed in my google searches, please enlighten me. From my point of view, it seems Adobe dropped the ball with this. It makes no sense to me why they would chose to make the software operate in this fashion.
Anyhow, I figured I would post this up as a warning to anyone else who uses Adobe software that may attempt to use the in camera cropping information feature as well as hopefully have someone chime in with an easy fix.
