Crop
Removing unwanted areas from an image to isolate the desired region, commonly used for composition adjustment and aspect ratio correction.
Cropping is the fundamental image editing operation of removing peripheral or unwanted portions to retain only the desired area. It is widely used to refine composition after shooting or to fit images into specific aspect ratios for social media platforms.
Since cropping reduces the total pixel count, excessive trimming can result in insufficient resolution. For example, extracting only the central 25% of a 4000x3000 image yields just 1000x750 pixels, unsuitable for large prints. Professionals typically shoot with extra framing and refine composition through cropping in post-production.
On the web, the image crop tool enables free-form or fixed-ratio selection directly in the browser. Programmatically, the Canvas API's drawImage() method with source region parameters is the standard approach. Circular or polygonal crops combine clipping paths with mask operations.