Whether or not you straighten your digital photos, sooner or later you’ll probably need to crop them—trim them to a certain size. Most people crop photos for one of two reasons: If you want to print on standard-size photo paper, you usually need to cut away part of the image to make it fit the paper. Then there’s the “I don’t want that in my picture” reason. Fortunately, Elements makes it easy to crop away distracting background objects or people you’d rather not see.
A few cameras take photos that are proportioned exactly right for printing to a standard paper size like 4"x6" or 8"x10". (An image’s width-to-height ratio is also known as its aspect ratio.) But most cameras create images that aren’t the same proportions as any of the standard paper sizes. Figure 3-7 shows an example of cropping to fit on standard photo paper.
The extra area most cameras provide gives you room to crop wherever you like. You can also crop out different areas for different size prints (assuming you save the original photo). If you’d like to experiment with cropping or changing resolution (explained on Changing the Size of an Image), download the image in the figure (river.jpg) from this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com.
Figure 3-7. When you print on standard-sized paper, you may have to choose the portion of your digital photo you want to keep. Left: The photo as it came from the camera. Right: After cropping—ready for a 4"x6" print.
Elements 10 brings you some extra help in cropping photos to pleasing proportions with new crop overlays you can use as guides. They’re explained in the next section.
Tip
If your photo isn’t in the Organizer or another image-management program that automatically protects your originals, it’s best to crop a copy of the image, since cropping throws away the pixels outside the area you choose to keep. And you never know—you may want those pixels back someday.
You can use the Crop tool in either the Full Edit or Quick Fix window. This tool includes a helpful list of preset sizes to make your job easier. In most cases, the preset sizes are what you need, but if you want to crop to a custom size, here’s what you do:
Activate the Crop tool.
Click the Crop icon in the Tools panel (it shares a slot with the Recompose tool) or press C.
Drag anywhere in your image to select the area you want to keep.
The area outside the boundaries of your selection gets covered with a dark shield to show what you’ll discard. To move the area you’ve chosen, just drag the bounding box (the outline) to wherever you want it.
Tip
You may find the Crop tool a little crotchety sometimes. See the box on Crop Tool Idiosyncrasies for help making it behave.
Drag one of the handles on the sides and corners of the selection to resize it.
The handles look like little squares, as shown in Figure 3-8. You can drag in any direction, which lets you change the proportions of your crop if you want to.
You can rotate the crop area to any angle. This is a handy way to straighten and crop in one go. If you have a crooked image, turn the crop tool so that the outlines of the area are parallel to where straight should be in your photo and then crop. Elements straightens out your photo in the process. You can also turn on one of the new crop overlays, explained below, to help you create a more appealing image. In the Options bar, just go to the Overlay menu and choose the one you want.
If you change your mind, click the Cancel button or press Esc. Elements undoes the selection so you can start over.
When you’re sure you’ve got the crop you want, press Enter, click the red Commit button, or double-click inside the area you’re going to keep, and you’re done.
Figure 3-8. If you want to change your selection from horizontal to vertical or vice versa, just move your cursor outside the cropped area and you’ll see the rotation arrows (circled). Use them to rotate the crop’s frame the same way you would a whole image. Rotating your selection doesn’t rotate the photo—just the boundaries of the crop. When you’re done, press Enter or click the green Commit button to tell Elements you’re satisfied. The red Cancel button cancels your crop. (The symbols appear when you let go of the mouse button.)
Elements 10 includes a new features that can help you crop your photo in the most visually pleasing way: crop overlays. Choose an option from the Overlay menu at the right end of the Options bar, drag over the image, and you see guidelines that help you decide where to position your crop. Your options are:
None. This choice gives you no visible overlay, just the empty crop mask.
Rule of Thirds. This is the option Elements chooses automatically the first time you use the Crop tool. The crop area is divided into thirds, both vertically and horizontally. Figure 3-9 explains how to use this overlay.
Grid. You see the regular Elements grid over your image.
Figure 3-9. The basic idea behind the Rule of Thirds is simple: Most people find images more pleasing to the eye if the main point of interest isn’t placed squarely in the center. Instead, if you think of dividing your photo into by a grid of three lines, both horizontally and vertically, your subject will have more impact if it falls along one of those lines or, even better, where two lines intersect. Here, the crop places the Eiffel tower on a vertical line, the bridge on a horizontal one, and the place where the two points of interest meet falls where the two lines intersect.
Golden Ratio. This is the most complex of the overlays, a complicated arrangement of rectangles, squares, and diagonal lines. The Golden Ratio has been used as the basis for pleasing proportions in art and architecture ever since the pyramids, and it’s been used extensively by artists and photographers to create the most effective compositions. If you want to understand how it works, a good place to start is http://tinyurl.com/6kuue7u, which explains all about Fibonnaci numbers (the basis for the Golden Ratio) in nature and art, as well the math involved. The most basic way to use this overlay is to make sure that the small busy area where the lines converge is on the focal point of your subject, and to try to align the important features in the image with one of the dotted lines. So for instance, if you have a photo of a woman standing in a long line of people, put them along a dotted line and put the focal point over her face. If you want to flip this overlay so it aligns better with your image, just click the button to the right of the Overlay menu (It looks like two triangles pointing at a dotted line). To change the overlay’s orientation, just click the arrows between the crop numbers, as shown in Figure 3-11.
Figure 3-10. If the Crop tool stops cooperating, there’s an easy way to make it behave: Click this tiny triangle in the Options bar, and then choose Reset Tool from the menu that appears. If you want all your tools to go back to their original settings, choose Reset All Tools instead.
You don’t have to eyeball things when cropping a photo. You can enter any dimensions you want in the Options bar’s Width and Height boxes or choose one of the presets from the Aspect Ratio menu, which automatically enters numbers for you. The Aspect Ratio menu includes several standard photo sizes, like 4"x6" and 8"x10". The No Restriction setting means you can drag freely. The Use Photo Ratio option lets you crop your image by using the same width/height proportions (the aspect ratio) as the original. Figure 3-11 teaches you a timesaver: how to quickly swap the width and height numbers.
Warning
If you enter a number in the Options bar’s Resolution box that’s different from your image’s current resolution, the Crop tool resamples your image to match the new resolution. (Resolution is explained starting on Changing the Size of an Image.) See Resampling to understand what resampling is and why it’s not always a good thing.
The Crop tool is handy, but it wants to make decisions for you about several things you may want to control yourself. For instance, the Crop tool may decide to resample the image (see Resampling) whether you want it to or not (and without any warning).
For better control, you may prefer the Marquee tool. It’s no harder to use than the Crop tool, but you get to make all the decisions yourself. But there’s one other big difference between the two: With the Crop tool, all you can do to the selected area is crop it; the Marquee tool, in contrast, lets you make lots of other changes to the selected area, like adjust its color, which you may want to do before you crop.
To make a basic crop with the Marquee tool:
Activate the Marquee tool.
Click the little dotted rectangle in the Tools panel or press M. Figure 3-12 shows you the shape choices you get for the Marquee tool. For cropping, choose the Rectangular Marquee tool.
Drag the selection marquee across the part of your photo you want to keep.
When you let go of the mouse button, Elements puts dotted lines like the ones shown in Figure 3-13 around the selected area. (Chapter 5 has more about making selections.) These dotted lines are sometimes called “marching ants.” (Get it? The dashes look like ants marching around your picture.) The area inside the marching ants is the part that you’re keeping. If you make a mistake, press Ctrl+D/⌘-D to get rid of the selection and start over.
Crop your photo.
Go to Image→Crop. The area outside your selection disappears, and Elements crops your photo to the area you selected in step 2.
If you want to crop your photo to a particular aspect ratio (proportion), you can do that easily. Once the Marquee tool is active but before you drag to make a selection, go to the Options bar. In the Mode menu, choose Fixed Ratio, and then enter the proportions you want in the Width and Height boxes. Finally, drag and crop as described in the previous list, and your photo will end up with the exact proportions you entered.
You can also crop to an exact size with the Marquee tool:
Check the resolution of your photo.
Go to Image→Resize→Image Size (or press Alt+Ctrl+I/Option-⌘-I) and make sure the Resolution number is somewhere between 150 and 300 if you plan to print your cropped photo (300 is best, for reasons explained on Resizing for Printing.) If the number looks good, click OK and go to step 2. If the resolution is too low, change the number in the Resolution box to what you want. Make sure that the Resample Image checkbox is turned off, and then click OK.
Activate the Marquee tool.
Click the Marquee tool (the little dotted rectangle) in the Tools panel or press M. Make sure you’ve got the Rectangular Marquee tool, not the Elliptical Marquee tool.
Enter your settings in the Options bar.
First, go to the Mode menu and choose Fixed Size. Next, enter the dimensions you want in the Width and Height boxes. (You can also change the unit of measurement from pixels to inches or centimeters if you want; just change “px” to “in” or “cm.”)
Drag anywhere in your image.
You get a selection the exact size you chose in the Options bar. You can reposition it by dragging or using the arrow keys.
Crop your image.
Go to Image→Crop.
The Cookie Cutter tool also gives you a way to create really interesting crops, as shown in Figure 3-14.
Tip
If you’re doing your own printing, there’s no reason to restrict yourself to standard photo sizes like 4"x6"—unless, of course, you need the image to fit a frame of that size. But most of the time, your images could just as well be square, or long and skinny, or whatever proportions you want. You can be especially inventive when sizing images for the Web. So don’t feel that every photo you take has to be straitjacketed into a standard size.