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Cropping and Retouching Photos

Cropping photos

Photos are cropped so that only the wanted section of the image (e.g., the subject or main area of interest) is retained. The process of cropping a photo is very simple. The steps are usually as follows:

  1. Open the image file in your image editing program.
  2. Using the selection tool (normally an arrow cursor), click and drag a selection box anywhere on the image.
  3. *Resize the selection until it includes exactly that part of the photo that you wish to retain.
  4. Right-click on the selection or go to the "edit" menu and select an option like "Crop", "Crop selection", or "Crop - keep selection" (or something similar).

*Some programs have the option of creating a selection box of a specific aspect ratio (the ratio of width to height), such as a standard landscape photo format of 4:3. To maintain a fixed aspect ratio, make sure that you only resize the selection box by its corners (diagonal double arrow cursor) rather than width-wise (horizontal double arrow) or length-wise (vertical double arrow). In addition, it is normally possible to drag the box around, so that it is centered over the area of the image you wish to retain.

Retouching photos

This can be useful for photos that have defects such as red eyes, slight blurring, excessively low or high contrast, or colour saturation issues. These topics are beyond the scope of this tutorial, so please consult your camera manual, photo editing software help, or another web source (let Google be your friend :) ).