How to Crop a Photo and Images in Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019

Watch the Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019 video training tutorial below. We will discuss a detailed look at cropping in expert mode and demonstrate how to use the crop tool, cookie cutter, and perspective crop tool.

Welcome back to our course on PSE 2019. It’s time now to look at the cropping tools in PSE 2019. Cropping is one of the most frequent operations that people generally perform in PSE. The cropping tools have undergone a lot of further development in recent versions.

If you haven’t used a very recent version of PSE before this section may well be very useful to you. So, first of all, I’m going to give you an overview of the cropping tools. I’ll then perform a standard crop. We will look at the crop options, the Cookie Cutter Tool, and the Perspective Crop Tool.

Let’s look at the available crop tools. If I go to the Modify group, the top left-hand corner in that group: we have a Crop tool. There are in fact three crop tools.

There is the Crop tool itself. The Cookie Cutter tool which we’ll look at a little bit later on. The Perspective Crop tool which we’ll also look at later on. Each of those tools has its own options. Well, let’s concentrate on the Crop tool first.

Before I do a crop on this image, just look at what’s displayed at the bottom of the main window. We’ve already seen that zoom control but we also have displayed here a feature of the document.

This actually gives us a number of characters. The number of bytes used in the document. I’m going to change that display. Instead of showing the size of the document in terms of characters, I want to show the document dimensions.

Now, it’s currently just over 22 inches by 16-2/3 inches at 180 dots per inch. I want to crop this picture to be a six by four at 300 pixels per inch. So, first of all, I’m going to change the resolution and change it to 300.

And then, I’m going to make it a six by four. Now, in fact, six by four must have been the last size that I did because it’s set at six by four already.

To get six by four landscape or four by six portrait you choose the relevant option here. Then, if you need to switch the width and height. The other options available there, no restriction.

If you want to do a freehand crop you can use the existing photo ratio or any of these other ratios or of course enter any size that you want in these two boxes. But we’re going with a six by four at 300 dots per inch. S

All I do now is draw a rectangle on my picture. PSE makes sure that the rectangle has the aspect ratio I’ve stated. That’s six by four. I’m going to make that a little bit bigger. When I’ve got the crop to exactly where I want it to click on tick and the crop is done.

Now, notice when it’s finished it displays here the dimensions six by four at 300 dots per inch. So, I’ve achieved exactly what my target for the crop was.

And of course, in order to achieve that size and resolution PSE will have resampled the image.

Let me now run through some of the crop options. First of all, I’m going to work on this image again. But I’m going to take it back to its initial state.

If you’ve done multiple changes to an image or indeed if you’ve only done one if you go to the Edit menu, there is a Revert option. Which takes the image right back to where it was at the beginning of this session.

The first thing I want to look at is what happened just now when I did a standard crop because as I started to draw a rectangle. You can see in that black box just above the cursor, to the right of the cursor, this current size of the rectangle. And that can be very helpful, particularly if you’re doing a sort of freehand unrestrained crop in getting an image of exactly the right size at the selected resolution. So that can be very useful.

And I also mentioned earlier on the rule of thirds. In the Tool Options, there is a grid overlay section.

When I did the first crop just now I had no grid overlay. Another option is to use the rule of thirds grid overlay. The way the rule of thirds works is that you have a grid. It has two horizontal lines, two vertical lines, and the objective is to get key focal points of the image at intersection points. Anyone of the four intersection points.

In this case, if I wanted to crop this picture, I maybe would try to get the Abbey, one of the main points of interest in the image at one of the intersection points.

So, the rule of thirds says that that would be a good kind of crop to try. Or if I saw that, maybe not so impressed with it I can revert, stick with the rule of thirds, maybe something like this, move the Abbey again to a focal point, and so on.

So the rule of thirds is not something to sort of slavishly follow but it can be very useful in giving you a good point to start with structuring an image.

Now, let me go back to the no overlay. Something else that can be helpful is these crop suggestions. These are created using PSEs own intelligence.

It looks at the picture, tries to decide how to crop an image. If you look at one of these and think: “Yeah, that looks pretty good actually”. I quite like the look of that one.”

If you click on that and then maybe crop that one, it’ll then come up with another four based on that on that one. If you want to progressively crop until you get something, you’re really happy with those suggestions can be very helpful.

And just one other thing. I’m going to use the third grid overlay setting. I’m going to put on the full grid. And particularly using this option you can also straighten an image when you’re cropping it as well. The presence of the grid will help quite a bit as you’ll see.

Let’s suppose that my intention is to crop this picture. I’m going to stick with six by four. I sort of draw my crop box on there. I know that the picture is crooked. In fact, when I took the picture, I made it slightly crooked deliberately.

I’m going to use the top of the cliff there and the land that the Abbey is on as a guide as to what flat land should be.

If I hover with the cursor just outside the grid, you’ll see it’s now a double-headed arrow with a slight angle. If I click, I can rotate to try and make the top correspond to a gridline. Now, when I tick, it will just straighten the picture as well as cropping it.

Now, let me use the Cookie Cutter. Select the Cookie Cutter tool, choose a shape. Now the shapes are categorized. There are some default shapes. Let’s look for something in the category of nature.

This is supposed to be a sunny day. Let’s have one of those suns as my cookie cutter shape. Having selected a shape, I can decide on whether I want this unconstrained, define proportions, etcetera. Let’s leave it unconstrained. I’m just going to do this freehand if you like.

When you draw the cookie shape on the picture you can either draw it from a corner or an edge or from the center. Sometimes it’s easier from the center. In this case, I’m going to center the cookie on the Abbey. This is going to make that a lot easier.

If you want to soften the edges a little you can apply some feathering. I don’t want too much here. Maybe 15 pixels. That’s maybe a bit too much. Maybe I’ll just do say 12 pixels of feathering.

And then, if when you’ve applied the cookie, you want the whole picture cropped to that size, you need to check this crop box checkbox here. That’s it!

I’m going to start at the Abbey. I’m going to draw my sun out there, tick to commit. There’s my Cookie Cutter crop.

Now, of course, the transparent background, the checkerboard pattern in the background makes it a little bit more difficult to see. But hopefully, you get a good idea on using the Cookie Cutter from that.

Finally, let’s take a look at the use of the Perspective Crop tool. Most photographers come across perspective problems at some time or other.

It can be to do with the angle at which you’re taking a picture, maybe a lens you’ve used. But you get a picture like this one that I took of Ripon Cathedral where it really looks as though it’s all leaning over.

Now, of course, it’s purely because of the angle and probably the lens that I used that this picture looks the way that it does. You can correct perspective issues using the Perspective Crop tool.

So, first of all, let me select the tool. Note, that I can set the height, etcetera. There is a checkbox there, Show Grid. I usually do show the grid when I’m doing this. Because it helps me to achieve the level of straightness that I want.

In this particular image, the perspective effect is quite extreme. And if I was to literally just pull the sides of the towers out at the top, it would make the cathedral look rather fatter than it is.

So, what I do in this situation in order to maintain a true view of the shape of the cathedral is not only to pull the sides out using the Perspective Crop, but also to lengthen it to compensate for that pulling out.

I’m going to start drawing about there. I’m going to lean in the right side quite a bit and the left side quite a bit, commit that, and that’s a much better representation of what the front of the cathedral looks like. I’d probably have to experiment with that once or twice to get it quite right but as you can see it’s already greatly improved.

That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

Adam Lacey

Adam Lacey is an Excel enthusiast and online learning expert. He combines these two passions at Simon Sez IT where he wears a number of different hats. When Adam isn't fretting about site traffic or Pivot Tables, you'll find him on the tennis court or in the kitchen cooking up a storm.