Video:Elements Tutorial: How to Crop Photos

Transcript:Elements Tutorial: How to Crop Photos

Hi, I’m Pelpina, here for About.com. In this screencast, I’ll show you how to crop photos using Photoshop Elements. 

Photoshop Elements Crop Tool 

There are two different places to crop photos in Elements. If you’re in the regular edit work-area, you can select this crop tool on the left hand side of your screen. If you’re in the Elements Organizer, select the Fix tab right here, and click on crop, right over here. Now that you have the cropping tool enabled, you can go ahead and select the area of the picture you’d like to keep. Just click and hold your mouse, and drag it over the picture. Then release the mouse button. This is the crop selection. The way the crop tool works, is it removes that part of the image that surrounds the crop selection. So everything you select, you will keep. That will be the new picture. You can still move the borders around a bit, as you can see. And when you’re satisfied, just click the green commit button. And there is your new cropped picture! 

Options for Cropping Photos

If you want to use another resolution than that of your photo, go to the aspect ratio menu - and select one of these options:

• No restriction: lets you resize your photo to any dimension you want - great for online images for example.
• Use photo ratio: keeps the original aspect ratio of the image
• Preset size: lets you specify a specific preset size for the cropped picture, which is perfect if you’re cropping the picture for a 4 by 6 photo frame, for example.  

As you can see, you have different cropping options. Just play with it a bit, and soon, you’ll be a cropping hero! For more Photoshop elements tips, go to compute.about.com. Thanks for watching!