How to Crop Your Pictures

I am using PaintShopPro v3.12 for this example. It is a freely available older version of the excellent Corel (formerly JASC) product. I use this version almost exclusively for graphic work for eBay auction listings. It is simple to use and quite powerful. The principles of this tutorial will, however, apply quite easily to whichever graphics program you choose to use.

Cropping pictures is the place to start when you want to resize your image files. It is the first step in a three step process:

1. crop (cut) away any un-necessary area
2. resize (shrink) the display size of the image
3. compress (when saving) the graphic to reduce actual file size

You can crop pictures (and resize and compress them) with pretty much any good graphics program. Irfanview is a good little program for graphic manipulation, and it's free. PaintShopPro is an affordable commercial program that has all the bells and whistles. An early shareware release of PSP (v3.12) is available and does everything you will need. It is non-expiring, even though the nag screen says 30 days, and is a great starter program until you are ready to invest in it's commercial big brother. Download PSP v3.12 here.

When you install and run the program, it will look like this:

The first thing you need to do is open the tool bars you will need to work with your graphics if they are not already open. You find them by clicking on these buttons:

Clicking both of these buttons will open (and/or close) the tool bars. You will see them something like this:

These tool bars are "sticky" ...that is, once they are open, if you close the program and re-open it, they will still be there. If you close them (click on the buttons) again, they will stay closed.

Next you need to open your graphic. Do this in the usual fashion, Selecting the File menu at the top left and then Open and browse to your picture file and double-click on it.

With your file open in the program, you need to select the cropping tool.

picture used with permission from the lullaby loft

Using the cropping tool and your mouse, click and drag open a box that defines the area you wish to keep.

picture used with permission from the lullaby loft

Next, using the Edit menu select Copy and then Paste, As new image and you will have a new image of the cropped area you defined:

picture used with permission from the lullaby loft

The last thing you will need to do is save this file with a new name and you will have it ready to use. You may want to learn about resizing and compressing files. Look for those items on my HTML Help site.

The version of PaintShopPro that is shown here is an early version that was released as non-expiring shareware. It is free to acquire and use. It has a 'nag' screen at the beginning that encourages registering (buying the new version) after a certain number of days. You cannot buy this version anymore. If you like this program I am sure you will find the newest (and greatly advanced) version of PainShopPro well worth the investment, however you may want to keep this older version around too, as its ease of use for basic images cropping, sizing and compression makes it a useful tool. I still use this version (v3.12) for most of my auction graphics.

It's always the right time to use good code!

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