In a previous post I wrote about the Rule of Thirds as a way to compose your images. When you crop your photos in Lightroom you are conveniently provided with an overlay for the Rule of Thirds.

But Lightroom offers a few more overlays for other compositional guidelines. I don't believe it's a documented feature (or at least not very well documented!). When you are in the crop tool press the O key (that's the letter O) and the overlay will change! Here are the other overlays:

A Diamond overly:

A Basic Grid:

There are three overlays based on the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean is one of those naturally occurring numbers like pi. It is basically the ratio between numbers in a Fibonacci series where each successive number is the sum of the preceding two numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc.). That can be used in the following three overlays available in Lightroom:

The Golden Mean version of the Rule of Thirds:

The Golden Triangle:

The Golden Spiral:

Another slick feature with the last two overlays is the ability to change their starting point. By pressing SHIFT-O when one of them is on the screen the layout will change. If the first Golden Triangle doesn't look right press SHIFT-O and see if the new one is right.

The Golden Spiral offers eight variations. Here are three:

Next time you are looking for other ways to compose your images try these overlays out. You may go down some creative roads you haven't travelled yet and discover a whole new world of composition!