# Lightroom: How to manage different aspect ratio cuts



## Marsu42 (Apr 3, 2014)

I know this isn't exactly a LR forum, but in the abscence of a 7d2 or 35L rumor for over a week  probably someone can help:

My workflow contains exporting to different aspect ratios for screen and print (2:3, nearly 2:3 paper size, 16:9, 16:10, sometimes 4:3). Problem is that with Lightroom, I currently have to add another virtual copy, crop it and sync all changes from the master (there is a commercial plugin for this) to the copies. All in all, quite a pita.

Is there some smarter version to have different crops in a single LR shot and export all these cuts in one go, most likely via a plugin I'm not aware of? Am I the only one with this annoyance, do you only export 2:3 and everything's peachy?


----------



## PTT (Apr 3, 2014)

Marsu42,

I watched this the other day. Maybe it will help since Lightroom can have several processes working at the same time.

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/the-complete-picture-with-julieanne-kost/exporting-images-from-lightroom-4/


----------



## Frodo (Apr 3, 2014)

I possibly don't understand your problem. I also produce different aspect ratios, e.g 16:9 for screen, etc. Lightroom allows for the simple selection of aspect ratios in the crop function ("r").
If you want to expect a range of aspect ratios with one button click, I would never do that. One of the most important parts of my work flow is cropping for composition and usually crops are not centred on the image. 16:9 will often be lower or higher to get more or less sky. 4:3 will be to the left or right (or more frequently up or down in portrait format).
I would never want a plug-in to crop automatically.


----------



## Jim Saunders (Apr 3, 2014)

What about exporting from Lightroom and cropping to multiple files in another app? I don't know which one but it might be easier; watermarks might be a hassle though.

Jim


----------



## Marsu42 (Apr 4, 2014)

Frodo said:


> If you want to expect a range of aspect ratios with one button click, I would never do that. One of the most important parts of my work flow is cropping for composition and usually crops are not centred on the image.



Exactly, that's why I want different non-centered custom crops in *one* image w/o maintaining and syncing virtual copies just for this purpose.



Jim Saunders said:


> What about exporting from Lightroom and cropping to multiple files in another app? I don't know which one but it might be easier



I though about that, but I'd need a way to get the crop information (what parts to cut) out of LR. It could be done with keywords describing what pixels to cut, but I'd lose the cropping gui in LR.

Alas, thanks for your answers, as I expected currently there's no way around virtual copies :-\ and I now faintly remember already having read about others with the same problem. I hope Adobe sometime adds a way to have multiple crops in one image...


----------

