How to Easily Crop Photos Into Circles

Woman with camera

Cropping a picture into a circle used to mean buying expensive photo-editing software, or going through the trouble of downloading and installing sometimes difficult to use open source software. Today you can edit photos from your browser without paying or downloading the software.

Things You'll Need

• Adobe Flash Player 9 or higher

Instructions

1. Navigate to http://www.sumopaint.com/home/ and click "Open Sumo Paint and start fooling around!" A new window will pop up. If no window pops up, make sure your pop-up blocker isn't preventing the new window from appearing.

2. Click "File" in the menu bar. There are two options you might want to choose. If the photo you wish to crop into a circle is on your computer click "Open from My Computer..." then find and click on the photo you wish to open, then click "Open."

   If the photo you wish to crop is hosted on the internet, click "Open from URL..." and then paste the URL of the photo into the text box in Sumo Paint, then click "Open."

   Your photo will appear in Sumo Paint.

3. If your photo has a very high resolution, you will not see the entire picture and cropping it will be difficult. To make the picture appear smaller, click on the Zoom Tool. It will be a button on the right, third from the bottom, in the Tools window. It looks like a magnifying glass. Click the minus sign Next to "Zoom Mode:" under the menu bar. Click on your photo until you can see the entire image comfortably on your screen. If you zoomed out too much, you can click the plus sign next to "Zoom Mode:" and make it bigger.

4. Make a new layer by clicking on the Add a New Layer button. It is on the bottom left of the Layers window and looks like a sheet of paper with a plus sign on it. An empty layer will appear in the Layers window above your photograph.

5. Though this photo editor has an elliptical selection tool, it will prove difficult to make a perfect circle with it. You will instead use the Circle Tool, eighth from the top, on the left in the Tools window. Click on the Circle Tool.

6. The toolbar under the Menu Bar will change. Click on the gradient next to "Fill:" then click on the first button to the right of "Fill Type:" from the menu that dropped down. The gradient next to "Fill:" will change to white. Click on this white space to close the drop down menu.

7. Place your mouse cursor on the place you wish to be the center of your photo. While holding the Shift key, click and drag out a circle covering what you wish to be the visible area of your photo. Release your mouse, then release the Shift key.

8. Click on the Magic Wand Tool, second from bottom, on the left in the Tools window. Click the white circle you've made. It should now have a border around it.

9. Click on the layer that your photo is on. It will be directly under the layer your circle is on, in the Layers Window.

10. Click "Select" on the Menu Bar, then click "Select Inverse" from the drop down menu. Press Delete on your keyboard. Click "Select" on the Menu Bar, and once again click "Select Inverse" from the drop down menu.

11. Click "Image" on the Menu Bar, then click "Crop" from the drop down menu.

12. Delete the layer the blank circle is on by clicking on it in the Layers window by right clicking it, then clicking "Delete Layer." Your picture will appear, cropped into a circle.

13. Click "File" on the Menu Bar, then click "Save to My Computer..." from the drop down menu. Save your picture in either PNG or JPG format by clicking their corresponding bubble, then clicking "Save." Choose a name and destination for your picture and click "Save."

Tips & Warnings

• The PNG format is a lossless format, while JPG is not, so you should decide whether you need a high quality photo with a bigger file size, or a lower quality photo with a smaller file size.

References

• Sumo Paint: Cropping pictures in Sumo Paint