What You’ll Learn in This Hour:
<objective>The principles of good image composition
</objective> <objective>Ways to crop pictures to maximize their impact
</objective> <objective>How to rotate crooked pictures, as well as ones that are just upside down
</objective> <objective>How to flip pictures
</objective> </feature>How many times have you taken a picture and then, when looking at it later, thought it should look a lot better than it does? It happens to the best of us, and a good portion of the time, the problem turns out to be the picture’s cropping. As any art student can tell you, what you leave out of the picture is almost as important as what you leave in. It’s all about focus—encouraging the viewer’s eye to look at what you think is the most important feature of the picture. You can help make that happen by getting rid of distracting elements.
With digital images, you’re not restricted to standard print sizes, so you have a lot more latitude in how you crop a picture and what shape the final image takes. As you work with an image, you can also rotate it (a little or a lot), straighten it, and flip it left to right or top to bottom until it’s just the view you were hoping for when you originally shot the photo.
When you’re taking pictures, be sure to give yourself room to crop. Use your camera’s LCD preview, if it has one, to judge composition, before and after taking a shot; then go back and take more shots to see if you can do better. Although you don’t want to have to trim off 90% of the picture’s area to get the photo you were going for, it’s good to have some room around the edges to play with.
Photoshop Elements has a special tool just for cropping—that would be the Crop tool, of course—but you can crop in other ways:
The Cookie Cutter tool deletes all of the image that falls outside the bounds of the shape you draw with it—but instead of cropping, it just hides the rest of the active layer. You can do this when you want a background image, color, or pattern to show around the edges of the cropped image (see Figure 11.1).
Using the Rectangular Marquee tool, you can select part of an image, copy the selection, and then paste it into a new image file. This method preserves the original, uncropped image as well as the new cropped version, so it’s a useful technique. Remember, when you copy something and then create a new file, Photoshop Elements automatically fills out the Width and Height fields with the dimensions of the image on the Clipboard.
Shrinking the canvas size also crops an image, but without any visual feedback while you’re setting the amount to trim. There’s no real reason to bother using this technique.
You can crop an image using a selection created with any selection tool. With the selection active, choose Image, Crop. The new canvas is the smallest rectangle that can contain all the selected areas (see Figure 11.2). Using this technique with a selection produced by the Magic Wand or the Quick Selection tool is a good way to zoom in really tight on your subject while ensuring that you don’t trim off any of it.
If you decide to choose Edit, Crop with no active selection, Photoshop Elements simply trims the canvas size by 50 pixels on each side.
The first thing you have to decide when you’re working to improve a picture’s composition is what the photo’s true subject is. Perhaps the shot started out as a group portrait with a stunning landscape in the background, but it turns out that the best part of the picture is the silly expressions on everyone’s faces. So you decide you want to focus on those faces rather than the scene as a whole. That means cropping out the landscape in the background—but you have to figure out how much and which parts. Or, as in the case of Figure 11.3, you may have some other reason for removing part of the photo.
When we look at photos, our eyes automatically jump to faces and to objects that stand out because of their color, size, texture, or some other attribute. It’s also true that we look at specific places in an image before we look at the image as a whole. For maximum impact, then, you want to use an object that will draw the eye and put it in a location where it will be noticed quickly. But where?
Take a look at Figure 11.4, which I’ve divided into thirds vertically and horizontally to form a grid with nine squares. The “rule of thirds,” a compositional principle that artists have used for hundreds of years, tells us that a viewer’s eye is instinctively drawn to the four places where the gridlines intersect. And these are the best places for an object you want people to look at, whether that’s a portrait subject’s eye or the most beautiful flower in a bouquet. The next best location is right in the middle of the image, as you might expect. But framing your picture so that the subject is slightly off-center gives it more visual interest, so that’s another good reason to use the rule of thirds.
Did you Know?
You can overlay the “rule of thirds” grid on your pictures using Photoshop Elements preferences. In the Editor, choose Edit, Preferences, Grid and enter 33.33 percent (as opposed to inches or another unit of measure) in the Gridline Every field, with Subdivisions set to 1. Then choose a color and style for your grid lines. The grid won’t show when you print the picture or view it in any program other than Photoshop Elements, so make it as bright as you need it to be to show up well. To show or hide the grid in your picture, choose View, Grid.
The grid should help you decide whether your picture will look best horizontally (landscape), vertically (portrait), or square. Now you’re ready to crop it.
Crop a Picture
Photoshop Elements’ Crop tool is easy to use. You can even rotate the picture as you crop. Follow these steps:
In the toolbox, click the Crop tool.
Choose settings in the Options bar:
Use the Aspect Ratio menu to restrict the cropping marquee to particular proportions. Your choices are standard print sizes, accompanied by Use Photo Ratio, which maintains the same proportions the image currently has.
If you want the cropped image to be a specific size, enter dimensions in the Width and Height fields.
Photoshop Elements can adjust image resolution while it crops a picture. If you want to do this, enter your desired value in the Resolution field.
Click and drag in the image window to draw a cropping marquee.
Drag the handles at each corner and on each side of the cropping marquee to adjust its size. Click and drag outside the marquee to rotate it (see Figure 11.5).
Click and drag in the cropping marquee to reposition it (this is particularly useful if you’ve restricted your proportions and you don’t want to actually resize the marquee).
Click the Commit button or press Enter on the numeric keypad to finalize the crop.
If you don’t like the results of the cropping operation, press Ctrl+Z to undo it and start over.
By the Way
When you draw a cropping marquee, the area outside it darkens, to help you focus on the crop area. This is called the shield. You can turn off the shield or change its color or brightness in Photoshop Elements preferences. In the Editor, choose Edit, Preferences, Display & Cursors. Uncheck Use Shield if you want to get rid of it; otherwise, choose a shield color and opacity percentage.
If you find yourself tilting your head while you’re looking at a picture, you need to rotate it. You can rotate images in 90° increments—useful when you turned your camera on its side to take the photo—or a fraction of a degree at a time.
As you know, you can rotate an image while you’re cropping it, but you can also use several different commands to rotate a picture at any time. You’ll find them in the Image menu, under the Rotate submenu; let’s take a look at some of your choices.
Choose Image, Rotate, 90° Left or 90° Right to counter the effects of having turned the camera to take the shot or having placed the image sideways on your scanner bed. If the picture is completely upside down, choose Image, Rotate, 180°.
If you use the Custom command, you can rotate any number of degrees to the right or left (see Figure 11.6). This option is most useful when you want to turn pictures to the same odd angle, for design purposes.
Straighten and Crop Image and Straighten Image have been part of Photoshop Elements since its inception—and they’re still usually not worth using. I don’t know how the program decides what’s straight, but it’s not using any criteria known to humans. Feel free to give these commands a try; in theory, they can straighten your image in a single step, or straighten it and then crop it to get rid of the extra background area (see Figure 11.7), but I have never liked the results of either command.
The other commands in the Rotate submenu fall into two categories: layer-specific commands, which work just like the regular Rotate commands but on just one layer at a time, and flip commands, which we cover later in this hour.
If your picture is just a bit off, you could choose Image, Rotate, Custom and guess at the number of degrees of rotation it needs to be straight. Or you could use the Straighten tool, which always guesses right and takes just one step.
To take this easier path, start by choosing the Straighten tool from the toolbox. Then locate a line in your picture that should be perfectly horizontal (the horizon, the top of a doorway, or something like that). Click at one end of it with the Straighten tool and then drag along the line, releasing the mouse when you’re satisfied that your line follows the image’s line perfectly (see Figure 11.8). Voilà! The image straightens perfectly, leaving you to crop any extraneous background areas before you’re done.
By the Way
The Canvas Options menu in the Straighten tool’s Options bar is very important. Start with it set to Grow or Shrink Canvas to Fit, and stay on that setting until you’re comfortable using the tool. Then you can try out the other options, which automatically crop the picture along with straightening it.
Sometimes you need a little visual assistance in deciding whether an image needs to be rotated and in which direction. You can make yourself a guide line by creating a new layer and then using the Custom Shape tool to draw a horizontal or vertical line on that layer. Press Shift as you drag to make sure that the line is perfectly aligned up and down or across. Keep the layer at the top of the Layers palette, and hide or show it as needed.
You have two very good reasons to flip an image so it faces the other way. First, if you’re printing on a transfer medium (such as an iron-on transfer), you need the transfer to be backward so that the final picture won’t be a mirror image. Second, sometimes you just think the picture would work better if the people were looking the other way or the lighthouse was on the other side.
To flip an image, choose one of the Flip commands from the Image, Rotate submenu: Flip Horizontal or Flip Vertical. If you want to flip just the current layer, choose Flip Layer Horizontal or Flip Layer Vertical.
Of course, some things will jump right out if you flip them. Watch out for these:
Type, either words or numbers
Clocks and watches
Objects traditionally worn on one side of the body, such as wedding rings and single earrings
Cars and other vehicles with the steering wheel on one side
Recognizable landmarks or personal features, such as scars or tattoos
If you flip an image containing any of these, your viewers are likely to notice—and chuckle (see Figure 11.9).
In this hour, we talked about cropping, rotating, and flipping pictures to achieve the best composition. Cropping is easy to do and can make a very noticeable difference in the appearance of a picture. You learned a few old-school composition guidelines, as well as ways to straighten and flip your pictures when needed. In the next hour, we look at perspective and distortion.
The Quiz questions for this hour are pretty easy, so you should be able to zip right through them and get to the Activities. Don’t skip those! They’ll really improve your sense of when and how to crop, rotate, and flip images.
From the book’s website, download
bowlingball.jpg. This picture is conventionally framed, with the subject at the center. Recrop it so that the focus is at each of the four gridline intersections from the rule of thirds. Which version looks best?Download another image,
boatsky.jpg. Try straightening the picture by dragging the Straighten tool along the flagpole. What happens? Can you still use this technique to straighten the image? What extra step should you take after straightening to fix it?Take a look at your photo collection and count the number of images that shouldn’t be flipped for some reason. What percentage of your pictures does this number amount to? Knowing this number gives you an idea of how much you’ll need to watch out for telltale image elements when flipping your pictures.