"Do Not Constrain" crop setting won't stick

Question

I never crop using a set ratio. The crop is always determined by the content of the image and I always want to be able to move one side independently of another, as with any other program, so this is making me crazy. It was a drag that Ap2 defaulted to a constrained ratio and made you toggle the menu at every boot, but I can't even get it to stay on the "Do Not Constrain" setting in between tweaks of the same image. Maddening.
It's a dealbreaker for me, no matter how great the rest is. Is this the way it is or have I got a quirk in my rig?
Thanks,
J

Answer 1

As far as exposure goes, the extra parts (surrounding film, either negs or transparencies; the slide mount) scan black, and with a decently exposed image, they shouldn't be much different than the black in the image. Note that this is completely unlike reflective scans of opaque materials, where you need to crop down while scanning, to keep the auto exposure from reading the surrounding border (which might be yellowed, say) or the scanner cover background (which might be much whiter than what you're scanning.) There have been a few times where I'm trying to rescue a blown out image and I'll crop in more on the subject of interest to get a better scan exposure.
As for cutting mats, etc. it's kind of ironic, but while I shoot almost nothing but film, I "display" the vast majority of it online! In which case, who cares what the proportions are in relation to standards, as long as they make sense for the image for whatever reason.
I thought of two more situations where I always crop randomly. First is the whole reason I bought Aperture: a life-long project (it will probably fall to a few generations of heirs at the current rate!) to get high quality pictures of every pinball backglass ever made. By the time I got to a couple of thousand slides, I desperately needed something like Aperture to help me organize and process the images. But there have been any number of backglass sizes over the years, plus I want to nudge the crops a bit even on ones that are the same proportions, to make up for an edge shadow or paint defect or whatever. And they all get cropped because I shoot them with decent "margins" to begin with, to allow room for deskewing, errors in the viewfinder vs the slide mount, etc.
The other one is sporting shots of my sons. I grab what I am capable of under the conditions (field position, lens length, my ability to track the action, etc.) and then reframe once scanned to make the best picture I can from what's there. Which leaves them all over the map in terms of aspect ratio, but then they're mostly viewed online by he and his friends, copied to Facebook, whatever, where standard ratios are completely unimportant.
Duncan