basic crop question in LR

Hello - there are times when i need to cut out a portion of an image so i use the crop tool. then when exporting, the image is distorted, grainy because of the image being cropped. is there a better way to reframe without making the object resized? i am free form cropping, and do not have the crop lock clicked. i do not have "resize to fit" checked.
i just want to cut out the cup without having the label resized larger

i know not the best shots, just for comparison
original

Byte size: ZERO | Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

Byte size: ZERO | Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

Well, if you crop out the cup, all you have left is the bottle, so when viewing the image it will be "enlarged"!

Now as far as cropping goes, that's up to you -- you can click the Aspect Ratio drop-down list and choose what will suit your viewing/printing needs. For example, if you click "Original" then you will lock in the 2:3 aspect ratio. Then, you go to a corner and a bit outside and click and drag around to turn the rectangel around to a vertical/portrait orientation and then drag the borders to the right size that eliminates the cup. Or, of course, you can choose an aspect ratio that will cut down on the height.

As far as the image quality, regarding being noisy, that's another issue, likely due to the low light leading to low exposure/high noise. Play with the LR Noise Reduction and the Masking feature in the Sharpening panel to see if you can "smooth things out".

thx tony, gave that a shot just now but wasn't able to rotate it all the way to portrait, only allowed me to rotate it to 45degrees. when choosing a diff. aspect ratio, the bottle still gets magnified. is there any way to basically just cut out the cup w/ out having the bottle enlarged? like having a pair of scissors and just cutting it off at that point so everything else remains as is?

will def try the masking as well. thx again

well, you can see from the two images posted that the word ABERLOUR is out of focus on both versions. and the word a'bundah is very sharp on both. my guess is you may not be enlarging the cropped version, but you have shrunk the original image. the original image posted above is certainly resized to fit. a 40d image at 1:1 is bigger than your screen. if you zoom in 1:1 on the original image and compare to cropped version i am guessing they will look the same. with the cropped version you are essentially pixel peeping.

dru8p wrote in post #11475358
is there any way to basically just cut out the cup w/ out having the bottle enlarged? like having a pair of scissors and just cutting it off at that point so everything else remains as is?

will def try the masking as well. thx again

Keep in mind: just because an image is showing on your monitor at a certain size, doesn't mean that is the absolute size of it.
Check your pixels per inch and see if the cropped image is actually the size you want, regardless of how large it appears on your monitor.
Or, turn on rulers (does Lightroom have rulers?) and see if the size is right.

I've seen numerous instances where someone's not reading the actual size of an image, and is going on what they see on the monitor - only to be unpleasantly surprised upon printing or pasting that image into another.

I could be entirely wrong, and Lightroom is arbitrarily enlarging your cropped images back to full size, but that doesn't sound like something the program would do.

good pt, i will check that too. thanks

dru8p wrote in post #11475358
thx tony, gave that a shot just now but wasn't able to rotate it all the way to portrait, only allowed me to rotate it to 45degrees. when choosing a diff. aspect ratio, the bottle still gets magnified. is there any way to basically just cut out the cup w/ out having the bottle enlarged? like having a pair of scissors and just cutting it off at that point so everything else remains as is?

will def try the masking as well. thx again

First, as to the crop, my mistake! I told you to click on the outside of the image, but instead go to the corner where your cursor has the little diagonal line through it -- make sure you have the aspect ratio set or the lock closed, then click and drag the corner up and over to change the crop to a vertical orientation.

Of course you can still do it free-hand if you wish, but I always crop with an aspect ratio myself to keep things the way I want.

As far as "enlarging", you are just seeing a "view" of the image. The "normal view is for the given image to fill the preview window, because that's just the way to work with the images in the Develop module. If you go to the Library module you can adjust your preview size any way you like. I'm not at my photo workstation with Lightroom riight now to give you all the details.

But, the final viewing size is up to you -- when you Export the image you are free to resize it -- for the Web, you can just export it to a smaller pixel dimension.

No, it certainly isn't. Not unless you instruct it to do so during conversion and exportation of a jpg.

As Tony says: You see the image at "fit to screen" size. So if you crop away a part, the remaining image will fit a bit larger....

On a side not: Ice? In an A'bunadh?