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Adobe Photoshop Elements
Cropping an Image
The crop tool is something you will have come across and may not have
recognized. Think of it as taking a pair of scissors to a
photograph. It allows you to choose an area of a photo that you
want to save and get rid of all the rest.
The crop tool looks like this:
Always crop your photo BEFORE you resize it. Otherwise you are going to
lose too much information and lower the quality of the final display.
 These instructions focus on Adobe Photoshop Elements, but
they will hold true for nearly all other common photo manipulation
software packages. You’ll even find the crop tool in your word
processor!!
1. Have your photo open so that you can see it.
2. Look for the crop tool in the “toolbox.”
3. Click on it to activate it.
4. Move into your picture. Click, hold, and drag your mouse across the
photo to select an area that you want to keep.
5. Normally, the rest of the photo will turn a different color and only
the area to be retained will be in full color.
6. Small handles appear around the box of the area that will be
retained. You can click and drag on these handles to change the
dimensions of the area to be cropped. Some programs even allow you to
move the box to another area of the photo.
7. Double-click to have it crop the picture.
You can also use the Marquee tool (the little dotted line box) to
select an area and then go up to the menu options, click on Image,
Crop. If you change your mind, you can always hit the UNDO command
under Edit IF you haven’t saved your changes.
Look at the following photos. The first one shows where I cropped the
picture BEFORE resizing. The second one shows the same section of the
photo but in this case I resized first.
Cropped then resized
Resized then cropped
Here's a short instructional movie showing the crop tool in action:
http://www.jmadden.org/Movies/Crop%20Tool%20in%20Photoshop%20Elements.rm
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