Overview

 

Stills for Video

The purpose of this program is to make it easy to crop a batch of images to a specific aspect ratio. Instead of cropping, the border area may be included if necessary, and the border colour can be changed.

If it is important that all of your picture can be seen then a Safe Area marker can be turned on to indicate the visible area of a normal TV.

There's nothing here that can't be done in many photo editing programs. However, what this program does is make the whole process as quick and easy as possible. Preparing hundreds of images such as you might need to create a slide-show on DVD for TV viewing, can be very time consuming.

Image Cropper was primarily designed to prepare images for inclusion a in video production where they have to fit a standard 4:3 aspect ratio, or a widescreen 16:9 ratio, but has uses in photo printing also. 

If necessary, the image can be resized to a resolution that matches standard video. If the crop is 16:9 but the image is saved in 4:3 this will result in an anamorphic image which will be stretched by the TV set so that it looks correctly proportioned. This is necessary if your video editor does not work natively in widescreen.

Several standard preset TV output sizes are included for resizing if necessary. It can be useful to reduce the resolution especially when working with big mega pixel images.

Note: if your video editing program can work in 16:9 format then don't save as an anamorphic. Normally there is no need to worry about the actual pixel size.

 

   Original 4x3 image

  Cropped to 16:9 widescreen

  Anamorphic 4x3 output

Fit to the safe area and include a black or coloured border

For maximum efficiency - and that's what this program is all about - multiple files can be selected (or drag-and-dropped) which are then presented to you one by one so you can make then final adjustments then save. Alternatively, if you just want to apply a fixed crop or resize process to all the images then the whole batch can be processed automatically.

Photo uses

Image Cropper is also useful in preparing photos for printing.  For instance, the popular size of 7"x5" doesn't fit the common 4:3 aspect ratio of digital cameras. Instead of leaving it to the photo printer to crop out the central area you can choose which area to print, and maybe also zoom in a bit. A selection of common sizes is included or custom sizes can be entered. No resizing need be done and there's no need to get involved in dots per inch, just get the height and width in the right proportion and leave the rest to the printers.

 

Requirements

A screen size of at least 1152 x 864 is recommended. So far only tested with Windows XP and 2000, but should be ok with 95/98/ME.

Installation

Place Cropper.exe and the Image Cropper Help Folder into a new folder of your choice. Make a short-cut to Cropper.exe. To uninstall simply delete the folder. There are no registry entries created.

When the program first runs it creates a file in the same folder called Cropper.INI. This file stores your settings when closing the program. If deleted, the program reverts to default settings.

Disclaimer

Please note:  This software is provided 'as is' with no guarantees of any kind. No responsibility can be accepted for problems arising from it's use.

 

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