Cropping and Composition

In the previous chapters of the book, we have dealt with getting you up, running, and editing in the quickest, most logical way possible, and to accomplish that, we have been holding the assumption that the image as shot is acceptable and does not need anything removed, or it does not need to be cropped. In this chapter, we will remove this assumption because a key portion of a workflow (what we will be working with in the next chapter) is cropping the image to create the right composition, the right structure and flow to draw the reader’s eye through the elements of the image you want them to see.

This chapter will be technical, covering what a crop is, how to get the desired output from your cropping activity, and how to correct it with the tools inside the cropping function of Affinity. After that, we will take a look at the composition elements in your image. We will cover things such as the rule of thirds and the concept of the golden spiral...