I have written here before that you can improve your photos quickly in just five steps – 1. Correct the exposure. 2. Increase contrast. 3.Increase saturation. 4. Increase structure. Finally, 5. Crop it. (see our blog). I think the most powerful crop is a panorama. See why?
Of course, the best way to make a panorama is to plan for it and make multiple exposures and combine them later in post-processing. What I am talking about here is finding the “panorama” in your standard 3:2 or 4:3 original image.
A panoramic crop can significantly improve your composition by concentrating the eye on the subject, eliminating distracting elements, and/or eliminating un-interesting things like a blank sky. If you want to keep it standard, I would use 1:2, 1:2.5, or 1:3. Here are some more examples.
Finally, I would suggest the same thing when using your cell phone camera. I love Snapseed and use it on every cell phone photo I make. It has a convenient crop option with a 16:9 ratio setting.
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