Cropping Photos

After you’ve sorted your images in the Organizer, one of the first editing tasks you’ll probably undertake is cropping a photo. There are a number of different ways to crop a photo in Elements. We’ll start with the basic garden-variety options, and then we’ll look at some ways to make the task faster and easier.

Step One:

Open the image you want to crop in the Elements Editor, and then press the letter C to get the Crop tool (you could always select the tool directly from the Toolbox, but I only recommend doing so if you’re charging by the hour).

SCOTT KELBY

Step Two:

Click within your photo and drag out a cropping border. By default, you’ll see a grid appear within your cropping border. This is a new feature in Elements 10, which lets you crop photos based on some of the popular composition rules that photographers and designers use. We’ll go over this feature more in a moment, so for now choose None from the Overlay pop-up menu in the Options Bar. The area to be cropped away will appear dimmed (shaded). You don’t have to worry about getting your cropping border right when you first drag it out, because you can edit it by dragging the control handles that appear in each corner and at the center of each side.