Hi,
I am using DXO for long series of birds photos once a week ( 100-500 typical) as most of birders. Typically the first level of processing is to reframe and crop. But the default crop tool starting way is highly painfull : The starting default of reframing-cropping tool is fixed to " conserver les proportions in french" or “keep the ratio” in english release i suppose. So we need to change most of time for each photo over hundreds to free cropping or some other ratio.
It would be a great time saving for long series to let the user choosing its “preference” : either free ratio, or keeep the ratio or 1: 1 etc etc.
I think you could do this with a partial preset - with every panel turned off in the preset except crop, and that panel set to ‘Manual’ and ‘Unconstrained’. Once you have created the preset, select all the new images after each trip and apply the preset.
I was equally frustrated about this as the original poster and think that aspect ratio should be sticky or in preferences. As a sports photographer, I continuously am dealing with crops which reflect the action and remove the distraction.
I do something similar but which reduces the extra step of applying a second preset. I build Autocrop with Unconstrained aspect ratio into my default preset and all the presets I use regularly.
I am not at my computer at the moment but I seem to remember that you can hold down a key (ctrl, shift or alt - I don’t remember which) and then the crop becomes unconstrained. This is a quick way of cropping without using any constraints. May help you!
Thank you! That works with the shift key when already adjusting the crop on my Mac. Update: And if the image is already ‘unconstrained’, pressing shift reverses that. The manual mentions this.
Additionally, the default preset for RAW images may be specified in Edit → Preferences… → General. When you create a preset to be set as the default, you can simply set the crop tool adjustments to Auto based on keystoning / Unconstrained or whatever you want to start with.