In PE4, the crop tool has a drop down menu item called "use photo ratio", which I've been using to keep the aspect ratio the same as the original when cropping.

After nicely cropping a bunch of pictures, I realized to my horror that the pixel count and resolution are staying the same, so it appears PE4 is resampling UP to achieve this! Which means, of course, that the pictures I cropped severely are looking awful, because of the significant upsampling.

This seems like strange behavior on PE4's part. Is there a way to crop to a preset ratio without the resampling? I just want to keep the aspect ratio the same!

Hi camner, One way is to select “ no restriction” from the drop down menu, then highlight the whole picture with the crop tool. This is your original aspect,whilst holding down the shift key (on a PC) crop to suit . This should retain the same aspect ratio and ppi’s ,albeit resulting in a smaller picture.
Albert.

Brilliant! Thank you. That's just what I was looking for...a way to keep the aspect ratio without sampling.