[UX] Image styles: make crop and scale+crop effects smart.

There are a few alternatives that do a better job (in-depth review coming up soon-ish):

Image Focus Crop

This module uses a few techniques, like face detection or entropy-based measure, to calculate the focal point of an image in order to provide a better "scale and crop" action.

Unlike other similar modules, Image Focus works with any image toolkit (both GD and Image Magick) and does not require any extra user input.

Face Detection

Face Detection module uses the jQuery Facedetection library to provide an image viewer jQuery plugin. demo here

Smart Crop

Smart Crop is an imagecache action that crops based on entropy, which produces more pleasing results when cropping to a fixed aspect (for example it can help prevent cutting off people's heads when cropping a portrait to a square. This does not mean it can do face detection, though that would be cool, wouldn't it?

The imagefield_focus module also provides integration with Smart Crop.

ImageField Focus

This module allows to scale and crop images focusing on their important portions. ... If you are using ImageField and ImageCache, you might have had hard times trying to get Scale And Crop to show what you actually want of your images. That is what ImageField Focus was made for. It allows you to tell ImageCache what portion of the image you want to focus to, and what portion you want to be cut out.

Key features: - Extends ImageField's Image widget (no separate widget!) - Adds a new Focus Scale And Crop ImageCache action. - Adds a new Focus Crop ImageCache action. - Uses a new jQuery plugin that will soon be also available as a separate download. - Integrates with Smart Crop.

Focal Point

Focal Point allows you to specify the portion of an image that is most important. This information can be used when the image is cropped or cropped and scaled so that you don't, for example, end up with an image that cuts off the subject's head.

This module borrows heavily from the ImageField Focus module but it works in a fundamentally different way. In this module the focus is defined as a single point on the image. Among other things this helps to solve the problem of guaranteeing the size of a cropped image as described here: https://drupal.org/node/1889542.

Additionally, Focal Point integrates both with standard image fields as well as media fields provided by the media module (7.x-2.x).