Help With Rule of Thirds for Aperture Users
March 8, 2009
Are you struggling with the “rule of thirds?” If you’re cropping in Aperture and you’re not sure where your subject should be placed relative to the rule of thirds, Apple has a trick up their sleeves in Aperture that just might help you.
Select the image you want to crop. Then select the Crop tool (C – shortcut). As you start to draw the crop area across the screen, simply press and hold the Command key. This will superimpose a grid over the photo that illustrates the rule of thirds, and helps you decide where to place your subject.
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The guidelines for the ‘Rule of Thirds’ is helpful (I use it in iPhoto), but I find the rule is very loose (as people already know). I tend to think slightly off is often better and have been looking at the Diagonal rule regarding composition.
Again, these rules are just guides.
I didn’t intend for this to be a debate about whether or not you should use the rule of thirds – just wanted to make sure people knew this feature was available. Thanks.
I wondered why it was so challenging to find this in Aperture. This feature is always-on in Adobe’s Lightroom and I rather prefer it that way.
Thanks. Newbies to Aperture, but I’ve found that the best part is in the missing manual.
To clarify from mrkgoo, in iPhoto the rule-of-thirds gridlines are always there when you resize the crop rectangle.
Thanks Scott. Aperture seems to have many of these useful undocumented, or at least not very well documented, features.
Beautiful picture…even uncropped. A wild guess that this was taken during Scott’s recent trip to Alaska. I’d love to do that sometime!
Sure looks like the Picnik tool on Flickr. :-)
This feature is available in NX2 as well, I wish there was an option to select more than purely rule of thirds grid lines though. It would be nice to analyze the photograph with Golden Mean, and other compositional tools. It would be VERY easy to implement and very helpful.
Very cool. In Lightroom, the crop tool automatically applies a grid showing thirds. Anyone know if there’s a way to turn it off (optionally?).
This feature also cycles through 6 different grids including Diagonal, Triangle, Golden Ratio and Golden Spiral and a smaller grid pattern by pressing the letter “O” while using the crop tool in Lightroom.
Lightroom – “View” > “Tool Overlay” > “Never Show” will do the trick.
Thanks for the tip! Though I’ve gotten good at eye-balling it, the grid lines do help.