Cropping photos clean for the web

The flash introduction to our National River Cleanup Week website looks great, however several folks who took a fresh look at it thought it was hard to tell that the photo of river trash was actually river trash.

I’m a little too close to the project, so I’m sort of useless, but more than one person mentioned the tough to tell river trash header. And that's enough for me.

So, we’re looking for another image, but we need a clean crop—a term I recently learned—and to further clarify PuffinWorks.com, our web developer, wrote this:

Attached [above] is a photo you sent me earlier that measures 500 x 375 pixels. I've outlined in red a crop measuring 500 x 100 pixels.

A clean crop is one like this that hasn't been compressed or changed in any fashion, but is simply sliced out of an entire photo.

We couldn't take the entire photo and compress it into this 500 x 100 pixel space or it would look squashed; likewise, we couldn't take this crop and stretch it into the size we need for your header image that is 770 pixels wide.

Thus, we've got to have a photo at least 770 pixels wide in order to "clean crop" a slice 770 x 230 pixels.

So the hunt continues for a good, clean cropped photo of river trash.