In December, I went through some of the most popular social networks and wrote about how to make your images pixel-perfect when exporting. There continues to be one social network that reigns supreme — Facebook.

While it’s fairly easy to crop and export for Facebook through Lightroom, it’s even easier with the built-in crop tool in Luminar 2018.

Working with the Luminar Crop Tool

If you’ve cropped images in Photoshop, Lightroom or any other image processing software, you’ll feel right at home when doing so in Luminar. Whether you export a Lightroom image to the Luminar plug-in or open up a file directly through the app, you get started the same way. Click the Tools drop-down menu, and then click on Crop. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut “C” to quickly open the cropping tool.

Feed and Cover Photo Options

The Luminar crop tool has two different Facebook sizing options — a square size for your feed, and a cover photo size. You can resize both, but by having the Lock enabled, it’ll keep the aspect ratio the same.

Once you select a crop for your photo, simply hit the “Done” button to apply the crop.

Easily Re-Crop

The nice thing about Luminar is you can easily re-crop the photograph by opening the cropping tool again. It retains your entire photograph as you’re editing, meaning you can quickly and easily adjust a crop as necessary as you edit your photograph.

But what about the edits you’ve made specific to the crop, like a vignette?

Worry not — there’s an option when applying filters to use either a Pre-Crop or Post-Crop mode. With Post-Crop mode selected, your filter will automatically change its position and/or size based on the adjustments you make to the crop.

Conclusion

It’s important that your social media photos look as great as possible, and having Luminar’s cropping tools can help you easily achieve that.

 

For more on Photography Marketing, see our weekly column.