How to Crop Photos for Scrapbooks

Video Transcript

"Hi. Welcome back to Expert Village. You are watching "Arts and Crafts and Everything Fun". I am your host Grace Fraga, and my guest, Sonya Shepherd from The Crop Circle is teaching us how to scrapbook. What is the next step that we need to learn? The next step, Grace, is cropping your photos, and you want to keep in mind that it's important to cut down your photos. It helps you get more pictures on a page, and you can really accentuate your photos by making the right kinds of crops and cuts. For example, this is sort of a unique photo. You have some different groupings happening here. You've got a lot of white space at the top. If I was going to crop this photo, I would do one of two things. I would either crop the entire top part up here, the empty white space, and sort of make it a long photo, maybe even cut off the bottom part here with the digital imprints, yes, and sort of make it long and skinny and just something different. Or, I would actually cut around the two groupings of people. You could actually cut this photo down into two and make it two distinct pictures on your scrapbook and change the focus of it a little bit. Can we see how that looks? Absolutely. The is a couple of different ways that you can do that. Okay. One is using the shape trimmer, and this is a product from Fiskars. It's really fun. You're going to want to use, again, a cutting mat, a template. The harder shapes to cut, I think are circles, so we've chosen the circle one. And you need your shape cutter from Fiskars. Look at this. It's really a groovy gadget. Great. It's basically like an Exacto knife in an easy carriage that works with the templates and makes it really easy to cut different things. How fun. Let's see how that works. Ok. So you take off your cover. That protects the blade. And you twist the spacer off of your shape cutter. You insert your photo on top of the mat, and you choose your template size that's going to best frame your photos. It's upside down, but you get the idea. You also want to make sure that the Fiskars logo is on top; that it's readable. If it's not, it's not going to cut well. Really? Yeah, it's kind of quirky like that. Wow. Then, you put your blade down on the inside of your photo and you hold down on your template and you just move everything along. And if it cooperates with you, it will pop out. Or, if it doesn't cooperate with you, you're in trouble. You have to do it again. Right. You have to do it again, or you can go to another cropping method, which is to crop by hand. Now that you've got a great score mark, you can actually follow that along and cut around it. It makes it easier. Makes it a little bit easier. Would you recommend trying on a piece of paper rather than pictures? I would try on paper first until you get used to it. The main time it's not going to cut like it didn't cut today, is if the blade needs to be changed, or you can adjust the pressure on the blade by twisting right here. It has a little orange thing. It's a little sensitive and it probably just got knocked in transit today. But this is the best way to cut your photos. That's great. Thank you. You're welcome. So what are we going to learn next? Next we're going to look at a couple of other fun ideas for cropping your photos. Great. Stay tuned for that."