Crop at the begining or the end ?

When editing a RAW photo in Photoshop is it best to crop the image before any other editing or do the editing and then crop.

Graham

It would be quicker in terms of processing time to crop first but even quicker to get the composition right when looking through the viewfinder

Do an initial crop early on ... leave it a little larger than you want. Do your processing and then the final crop.

I find it best to perform any necessary rotation first, to avoid any loss of image with post-crop rotation.
Then go on to full editing.

Roger.

Cropping is always one of the last things I do, usually on my 'master' TIFF file, and then from there I 'save as' a new JPEG, one for archive & printing, and another 'web-sized'.

Seems to me better to get all the 'major surgery' done first, only because when you make the final crop I think its best if you're seeing the exposure & colours in their finished state.

If your computer is quick enough that processing a large file is no bother then save the cropping for almost last (I'm told it's better to leave any sharpening till the very end).

I crop first as if the composition is shonky and I'm not sure it can be improved, it demotivates me from making the other necessary tweaks. If cropping does not or cannot improve the image, I ditch it and move on to the next.

I normally crop first. I want to get an overall impression before I spend more time on it

Do you crop to final size or, as I do, leave a small amount there for final tweaking and trimming?

Should have said, I'm in Lightroom, so while I crop to what I think I'm going to use, it is non destructive, and I'll often change it a few times afterwards.

I crop first too. There's no point doing, for instance, a levels adjustment and then chopping off half of what the adjustment was applied to.

The final sharpening though, should be applied after the final image has been resized for whatever output medium it's intended for. This is because the amount of sharpening depends on the size of the output.

If I'm going to apply any noise reduction, I usually do that immediately after the final resize, but before the final sharpening. A lot of noise just disappears when the image is downsampled, so again, the amount of NR depends on how big the final output is to be.

But isn't this idea just a hangover from very old advice, based on computer memory limitations from earlier times? Earlier editions of Martin Evenings comprehensive Photoshop guides dedicate a lot of space to issues like scratch memory settings and 'efficient' workflow approaches such as this cropping idea, in order to minimise the strain on your computer - and this is based on scanned TIFFs of up to about 100mb!!! Not a figure that really concerns me now with my 8gb RAM

Pentax + wildlife does not always allow this

The key issue may well be what sort of cropping you intend to do. If it's cropping without changing pixels then any time will do. If it involves resampling then I would do all the adjustments first before extrapolating the pixel structure. Then sharpening last, depending on the size of the final image.

If the image looks like it would benefit from a crop I like to do that first so that I'm not distracted by processing 'out of image' elements as I go along.

With PS that way of working would give a processing speed improvement as well I think, with a more modern non-destructive editor it doesn't make any difference what order you apply edit and crops can always be reworked or cancelled later on so work-flow is just personal preference.