Photoshop Lesson - Cropping a Photo

One of the easiest ways to improve a photo is to crop it. Cropping is the process of removing part of the picture that is not important. Many people who do Scrap Booking do a lot of cropping when putting together scrap book pages. They may want certain building or distractions removed from the photo. Other times you may crop to balance a photo so that the main subject is in the center. The other reason to crop is to have the picture fit a standard frame (3.5 x 5, 4 x 6, 5 x 7, or 8 x 10).

Some times a photo has a lot of dead space or empty space. In the photo below you will notice that it is a shot of the skyline at night. (First Photo Below)

The top 1/3 is all dark sky with nothing that adds to the picture. You need some dark sky to give perspective and feeling. If you want to make a print of the photo the lab will randomly crop the photo, more than likely it will crop the middle out of the photo.

Cropping is easy with most Photo Processing Software, I use Photoshop Elements 3. The first thing you do is import the photo to the software program. If you have Windows XP you can go to My Pictures and right click on the photo you want to works with. Right Click will give you a choice of what program you want to open the photo. Once the photo is open you need to select the crop tool and set the crop dimensions. Then drag the crop tool to include what you want in the new photo. Most Photo editing programs will show you a dotted out line of the new photo with the part cropped off darkened. If you do not have the photo cropped the way you want it take the corner of the dotted border and move it to included or exclude what you want. With some programs you can place the cursor in the middle of the cropped area and move the whole cropped area to include what you want.

The final cropped 5x7 photo includes more of the Las Vegas Lights and less sky. (Second Photo below is the cropped to a 5x7 photo) Photoshop or any other photo editing program can be user friendly if you take one process at a time and work with it. One other use of the crop is to change the direction of the picture from a landscape mode to a portrait mode. (Third photo below is a wide shot of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas)

You can use the crop to isolate the Lion in a portrait mode. (Last Photo below is MGM Loin isolated)

You now have a different picture - two pictures from one photo.

I hope this lesson has been helpful and watch for more lessons on Photoshop Elements.