Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3: Rotating and Resizing Your Photos 71

Cropping Pictures

4. When you’ve got your image positioned where you want it, click the green OK

checkmark or press Enter. (If you don’t like what you did, press the red “no”

symbol to cancel the rotation.)

Now you’ve got a nice straight picture, but the edges are probably pretty ragged

since the original had slanted, unrotated sides. You can take care of that by

cropping your photo, which is covered in the next section.

Cropping Pictures

Whether or not you straightened your digital photo, sooner or later you’ll proba-

bly need to crop it—trim it to a certain size. Most people crop their photos for one

of two reasons: If you want to print on standard size photo paper, you usually need

to cut away part of your image to make it fit on the paper. Then there’s the “I don’t

want that in my picture” reason. Fortunately, Elements makes it easy to crop away

distracting background objects or people you’d rather not see.

A few cameras produce photos that are proportioned exactly right for printing to a

standard size like 4" × 6". But most cameras give you photos that aren’t the same

proportions as any of the standard paper sizes like 4" × 6" or 8" × 10". (The width-

to-height ratio is also known as the aspect ratio.)

The extra area most cameras provide gives you room to crop wherever you like.

You can also crop out different areas for different size prints