How to Crop a Picture

Cropping is one of the easiest ways to make a good picture better. Here are a few steps to help you crop your precious pictures.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• A Digital Photo
• A Digital Photo editing program (i.e. Photoshop, Picasa, Windows Picture it)

1. Crop #1 Determine what kind of crop is best for you picture.
   After you have found the picture you want to crop take a look at it and try to determine what kind of crop would be best for you picture. The crop will depend upon what or who the subject is, and what is in the background. Some pictures can be cropped lots of different ways.
2. Crop #2 Crop the picture as close as you can to the main subject with out cutting out important details from the background.
   No matter what kind of crop you choose, as simple center close crop, an offset crop (seen in Crop#2) or a crop that zooms in on the subject(s) it's important to keep the crop CLOSE or TIGHT.
3. Crop #3 Save the picture you cropped under a different file name than the original. It's always good to keep the original so you can go back and re-crop it if you want. Another thing to try is do more than one type of crop with the same picture and see what which you like best.

Tips & Warnings

• One thing that really helped me develop an eye for cropping my own picture was looking at the ways other people cropped their pictures.