Crop and straighten your photos

Select a photo in the Library module that you want to crop or straighten. Click Develop in the Module Picker at the top of the screen, or press the D key, to open the selected photo in the Develop module.

Note: If you’re using the sample file provided with this tutorial, first import the sample file into your Lightroom Classic catalog.

Select the Crop tool in the tool strip on the right side of the Develop module, or press the R key. This opens the Crop & Straighten panel showing controls for the tool.

The example photo is tilted a bit and the horizon is not level. To straighten a photo with an obvious horizon line, select the Angle tool in the Crop & Straighten panel and drag along part of the tilted horizon in the photo. Doing this tells Lightroom Classic that this line should be level. When you release the mouse, the photo automatically rotates to make the horizon level.

Another way to straighten a photo is to rotate it manually. Hover your cursor just outside the crop boundary until the cursor changes to a curved double-ended arrow. Then drag to rotate the photo within the frame. You can use the grid overlay as a reference while rotating.

Drag any corner or edge of the crop boundary to resize the crop area.

Next, drag the photo within the crop area to select which part of the photo to keep.

Note: Take a look at the Lock icon in the Crop & Straighten panel before resizing the crop area. If the lock is closed, when you drag the crop boundary the width and height change together and keep the same proportion they had. If you want to crop to a different proportion, open the Lock icon by clicking it. Now you can drag any edge of the crop boundary independently.

If you want to crop your photo to a preset proportion commonly used for print, web, or video, click the word Original in the Crop & Straighten panel to open the Aspect menu. Here you can select a standard-size aspect ratio for the crop, such as 1x1 or 5x7. You can also constrain the crop to the aspect ratio of the original photo or enter a custom ratio that will be saved as an option in this menu.

Tip: Press X to switch the orientation of the crop area to horizontal or vertical.

For the sample photo, select the 5x7 aspect ratio from the dropdown menu, drag the crop boundary inward to make it smaller, and drag the image so the surfer is in the lower left of the crop area.

To apply your crop to the photo, click the Done button at the bottom of the workspace or click Close at the bottom of the Crop & Straighten panel.

Cropping in Lightroom Classic, like all adjustments, does not permanently change the photo. You can change the crop at any time by selecting the Crop tool in the tool strip again.