Cropping your pictures
| Topic: Cropping
your pictures |
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Most
pictures have what we call the "picture" and then all the
other stuff. Many pictures have several pictures within them. Look
at the picture on the left, above. The main subject of this picture
is the child reaching into the flower box. We can begin to reduce
the size of our photograph for use on the web by getting rid of all
of the stuff in the picture we do not want.
Find the cropping tool in your picture editing software and
use it to draw a box (often called a marquee) around that portion of
the picture that you want to save.
When you have done this, it will look something like the picture on
the left, above. Then select crop and your software will
delete all of the stuff outside the
marquee. Then your picture will look like the one on the right,
above. Because there are dozens of picture editing software
products, we will not endeavor to tell you where to find these
functions in your particular software.
Sometimes pictures are so dark that it is hard to tell which part
you might want to crop. In that case, go to the step to change the
brightness level of the picture first,
then crop it.
Above, we stated that there are often several pictures in one
photograph. By cropping, we created a simple example below of a
series of photos from one original
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National
Cemetery at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in
Southern Montana. |
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Man
grieving at the National Cemetery at the Little Bighorn
Battlefield National Monument in Southern Montana. |
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Man
setting up his camera at the National Cemetery at the Little
Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Southern Montana. |
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This is
the entire picture from which the above 3 were derived. Look
carefully at all of your photographs and you can pick the best
part to crop to convey the meaning you want. |
Now that you have cropped
your picture, let's move next to sizing the physical appearance of
it for the web. |
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