Cropping

[eeyoreland]

This is a pretty basic question so please forgive me. And it will probably be long winded and hard to understand, but I have a question about cropping. I have always used "free" photo editing software. If I have a picture I want to crop, there's generally something that makes me select the size of the photo I want and a box comes up that I must "fit" my cropped photo into. What I want to know is if there's a way to crop the picture and MAKE it fit into a 4x6print? For instance, I took a picture of my husband at a fountain and there's a girl standing fairly close to him. I don't want the girl in the picture, but when I try to crop the photo, she's close enough to him that I can't get her out of the pre-determined 4x6 box. I want to put a "free form" box around my husband and then say "crop to 4x6". Does my question make sense? Is this possible with any free software or any software at all? Thanks for your help. I feel you are all so advanced, but one of your regulars encouraged me a while back not to be afraid to post here. I won't mention his name, but thank you.

 

[atsolomon]

Hi,

Many free photo editing applications let you choose what format crop you'd like to make (4x6, for instance). Picasa from Google is pretty simple to use. You can choose the 4x6 ratio, change its size, and move it around in the photo so you can choose the new composition.

Does that make sense?

Here's a YouTube video that came up on Google that covers what you're looking for: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2BX2-ahTcw

Regards,

Adam

 

[eeyoreland]

Wow. Thank you for such a fast response. I watched the video and I understand how he cropped the picture, but if you crop on manual, what size does your picture end up being? Again, hope that makes sense.

 

[atsolomon]

Wow. Thank you for such a fast response. I watched the video and I understand how he cropped the picture, but if you crop on manual, what size does your picture end up being? Again, hope that makes sense.

Manual would be whatever ratio you pick manually.

If it is an image that you want to print, I'd recommend using the format you want to print it in, in your case 4x6.

4x6 is a ratio, not really a size, so you could try to print it any size you want. If you want to print that in a larger or smaller format, you end up having to crop it slightly differently for the other prints. 5x7 is a slightly different shape than 4x6.

Regards,

Adam

 

[Groucho]

Irfanview is another very nice free image viewer/editor that can do what you're after. View your photo and press Shift-C or go to Edit, Create Custom Crop Selection. You can choose the aspect ratio you want from a list or create your. Then, hold down Control and grab an edge to resize the box, drag it wherever you want on your photo, then press ctrl-Y or Edit, Crop Selection, and it will crop it. Press S or go to File, Save As, and give it a new name, and you're done!

 

[seashoreCM]

Does the crop operation give out any numbers or other quantitative description of the rectangle you specified?

Since you know that a 4x6 print has a 2:3 aspect ratio, once you get numbers to describe the rectangle for cropping, you can adjust that to get the same 2:3 ratio.

Then step 2 is resizing the cropped picture to exactly fill the 4x6 photo paper.

If you want to crop it a second time or if you did not get it the way you wanted the first time, start over with the original picture instead of crop the cropped picture.

Do not delete the original picture.