Photo Printing - The Full Story - Part 2

David Dorn looks at Cropping in the second part of this series, and introduces slide scanning as well..

If you're going to be manipulating images, you need the tool for the job. We're going to use PaintShop, which you'll find in our file libraries, so you can work alongside, if you want!

Among the techniques I want to look at are cropping, enlarging, blemish removal (retouching), image correction and, just for a bit of fun, comping. For the uninitiated, comping is the process of putting, say, Denise Van Outen's body beneath Bella Emberg's head. I'll cover that in more detail next time.

Cropping

Cropping is the act of discarding bits of an image, and retaining only the part that you really want to use. You would crop an image when you've been forced to take a picture from too far away, so you've got more background than you need, or when you've been presented with a complete image, of which you need to use only part. You crop an image to make it more aesthetically pleasing.

There are two times to crop, depending on how you acquire your image. If you're scanning a photo or transparency (either negative or slide), it's usually best to crop the image at the scanning stage. That means scanning only the rectangle you want, as opposed to scanning the whole thing and then cropping within PSP. By doing this, you save on memory usage and hard disk clutter, and your image can either possess a smaller file size or have a higher resolution for the same file size. On the other hand, if your image is coming off a PhotoCD, or across the Web, you can only crop in PSP.

The process itself is easy in PSP. Once you have your image open onscreen, select the crop tool, and simply drag a rectangle around the portion of the image you want to keep. You don't need to be hyper-precise, as you can fine tune the marquee once you've got it roughly positioned, by grabbing sides or corners and re-sizing and moving it. Once you're happy, simply double click within the marquee, and PSP will discard everything outside it.

Cropping at scan time in Epson's TWAIN module for the FilmScan 200 slide scanner. The marquee shows the area to be scanned. It's being scanned at 1200dpi, since it's intended for a 10x8" print. At this resolution, it will blow up to A3 quite well, if needed.
The Cropping tool selected on the tools toolbar.
The image has been brought into PSP, now we want to crop out a head and shoulders shot. Again, the marquee shows the area that will be kept.
The final result - we're left only with the section of the image that we want.
The final cropped image.

It's as easy as that.

Dave Dorn