Using Cropping To Create Square Videos and Square Photos

We recently had a request from a RightBooth user asking if it was possible to capture photos at the size 1080x1080 pixels, in other words, capturing square photos.

When asking why they wanted to do this, they showed us their required printer layout with four square photos arranged in a 2x2 grid placed above text as shown opposite.

This caused us to add the new cropping features that are now available in RightBooth (starting from version 5.1.20)
T​his article explains what cropping is all about.

To Crop or Not To Crop?

If you look at the recording sizes listed in RightBooth Video Settings, you will see that your webcam can be set to provide a video feed at one of a range of sizes, including 640x480, 800x600, 1280x720 and 1920x1080.
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When you choose one of the webcam sizes, then your video and photo files will also be captured at these sizes.  You will notice that with all the sizes available, none of them are square.  So how do you capture square photos?
Here we will focus on how to capture photos at the size 1080x1080 pixels.

Applying Crop

• In RightBooth Settings, click on the Photo and Print Tab
• Set the Photo capture size to 1920x1080  (this assumes your webcam offers this resolution, such as the Logitech C920)
• Tick the Crop photos checkbox
• ​Set the Width and Height values to 1080​

How Cropping Affects The Photo Capture

Without cropping turned on, your photo files will be captured at 1920x1080 pixels like this:

Photo saved at 1920x1080

But if you enable cropping (as described above) your photos will be cropped to the area indicated by the red outline and will be saved as square photo files having the dimensions 1080x1080 pixels.

Captured at 1920x1080

Photo saved at 1080x1080

You can see that by enabling cropping RightBooth will discard some of the webcam image in order to create your required photo aspect ratio.

Points to note:

• When you turn on cropping, the cropped area will always be centrally over the webcam image
• The cropping width and height value cannot be bigger than the webcam image
• The cropped area is all that will be shown to users during the event, and is also the size that will be used in the Event Designer and the Print Layout Designer

Finally don't forget, you can also apply cropping to your video recordings if required.