Cropping advice

bstonehouse

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Name
Brian
Edit My Images
Yes
I am looking for some advice on how to correctly use the Crop Tool in Photoshop Elements 7 as this an area that I am not completely sure about.

I am talking about cropping to improve composition or to zoom in rather than cropping to a particular print size. Imagine a hypotheical situation where I have a photo 3000x 2000 pixels for easiness and I want to crop to save the top right hand quarter of the photo only so I want to keep a portion that is 1500x1000 pixels - what is the correct way to do this ?

As I see it there are 4 options :-

1) Use the Crop Tool and 'Use Photo Ration' - if I understand this correctly this resamples the image to be the original size and resolution which is not a good method as it resamples the saved pixels to a larger size.

2) Use the Crop Tool and 'Use Photo Ration' with the Resolution field blank - if I uderstand this correctly this resamples the image to be the original size with a reduced resolution which is also not a good method.

3) Use the Crop Tool with 'No Restriction' This seems to give what is wanted - you end up with a photo that is 1500x1000 pixels with the original resolution. The only downside seems to be that you cannot maintain the ratio of the original easily as this appears to a 'freehand' method to produce any ratio required but no option to set a ration.

4) Use the rectangle tool which seems to work the same as above and has the advantage of using a set ratio.

From these options the Rectangle Tool would be the best method of acheiving a Crop with a fixed Ration and no resampling or changes in Resoluton.

I am interested in how others handle their cropping using PSE and also if I am correct in wanting to end up with a finished photo with no resampling albeit it will be a smaller photo.
 
Alternatively if I recall correctly Panos FX have an free action for both PS and PSE that asks you which size crop you want and then does it for you.
 
you should be able to set a custom crop ratio where it gives you the option for standard ratio's 6X4, 7X5 etc.

I don't use PSE though so its a guess on my part

HTH

Andy
 
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