Level 2 Plus

Lesson 8

Fixing a Photo - Cropping

Often there are parts of our images that we would like to exclude from the final print. We can accomplish this by cropping out the unwanted parts of the image.

Introduction

In this lesson we will discuss how to crop your images. We will cover how to place the cropping tool, modify cropping, and even rotate it. You will learn preset cropping, manual preset cropping and how to undo your cropping. We will conclude with a practical example from the last lesson.

For this example, we have selected an image that we wish to crop.

Cropping is the process of eliminating unwanted parts of the image.

Select the:

[ Crop Tool ]

The “Crop” tool is located in the “Toolbox”.

It is the 2^nd Tool in the 3^rd Group.

If necessary, see Lesson #5 for information on the “Toolbox”.

Whenever, you pick a tool to use, a new Menu appears above your image.

This menu is called: “The Tool Option Bar”.

It controls the properties of how the tool will work.

Place your cursor at a corner where you would like your new cropped image to start.

Drag the mouse diagonally across to the opposite corner and release the mouse.

The area that will comprise your new image will appear inside the selected area.

The area of your image that will be discarded will appear in a darker color.

You can now modify your image.

Put your mouse anywhere within the selected area and you can move the area to be selected around the screen.

Click on any side or corner of the selected border and adjust the size and shape of the border.

You can even rotate the selected area by placing your cursor just outside any corner.

This will transform the cursor into a two-headed arrow.

As an alternative, you can use a set of “Preset Crop Dimensions”.

These are accessible from the “Tool Option Bar” mentioned above.

If you want to crop your image to preset dimensions, we recommend that you set them directly into the “Tool Option Bar”.

This allows you to set the dimensions and the resolution that you wish to use. We will talk about this more in the next lesson.

In this example, we set a dimensions of 4” x 6” at a resolution of 240 dpi.

From the Main menu, select:

[ Edit ]

From the drop down menu, select:

You should have your “Undo History” palette on the screen. If this palette is not on the screen, return to Lesson #6 and bring it up.

If you go this palette and click the step just before the crop, it will take you back in time. The crop will have never happened.

Here is the image of the cupboards from the last lesson. The cupboards are not level on the horizon.

Here is our example, with the level horizon. Leveling was shown in the last lesson.

After the rotation, there was some loss to the area of the image. This is shown in white.

Here we have set the crop to exclude white areas.

Note that a certain amount of the area of the image will be lost in cropping.

This is the final appearance of the cropped image.

Conclusion

In this lesson we discussed how to crop your images. We covered how to place, modify, and rotate the crop. We covered preset cropping, manual preset cropping, and undoing cropping. We concluded with a practical example from the last lesson.