Cropping

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The Crop tool removes the part of an image surrounding the selection. Crop to remove distractive background elements and create a focus on your desired object in the image. When you crop an image, by default, the resolution remains the same as the original image.

The Crop tool removes the areas that fall outside the current selection. When you crop to a selection boundary, Photoshop Elements trims the image to the bounding box that contains the selection. (Irregularly shaped selections, such as those made by using the Lasso tool, are cropped to a rectangular bounding box that contains the selection.) When you use the Crop command without making a selection, Photoshop Elements trims the image by 50 pixels from each visible edge.

The Crop tool and technique is an essential part of the photo editing workflow. From Photoshop Elements 13 onwards, the Crop tool automatically displays four ready-to-use suggestions. You can choose the best crop for your needs from one of them. You can also continue to crop as much as you want to, after taking one of the four suggestions or rejecting all four suggestions.

To use the automatic cropping suggestions:

1. Open a photograph in Photoshop Elements.
   
2. Select the Crop tool. Four thumbnails displaying the automatic suggestions are visible in the Tool Options panel.
3. Click a thumbnail that you think is the best fit. However, you can look at more suggestions when you select a different aspect ratio from the drop-down list in the Tool Options panel.

The Perspective Crop tool lets you transform the perspective of an image while cropping it. This is useful when you have an image with some distortion. Distortion occurs when an object is photographed from a non-straight angle or when wide-angle lenses are used to photograph a large expanse of an object. For example, when you take a picture of a tall building from the ground level, the edges of the building appear closer to each other at the top than they do at the bottom.

The Cookie Cutter tool crops a photo into a shape that you choose. Select a shape and drag it on your photo to crop the photo in that shape. You can also move and resize the bounding box to get the desired area you want to crop.

The canvas is the workspace around an existing image, within the image window. It is the full editable area of an image. You can increase or decrease the size of the canvas, on any side of an image. Added canvas appears in the currently selected background color on the Background layer (by default), or selected canvas extension color from the Canvas size window. In other layers, the added canvas is transparent.

Camera shake can cause an image to be improperly aligned. For example, the horizon in the picture of a sunset may not be perfectly horizontal. In Photoshop Elements, you can realign the photo to cause the horizon to be perfectly horizontal. You can use the Straighten tool (P) to realign an image vertically or horizontally. You can also choose to automatically resize or crops the canvas to accommodate straightening of the image.

• In Quick mode, with the Straighten tool (P) active, simply draw a line along the horizon (when visible). When not visible, draw a line that you consider must represent the horizontal axis of the photo.
  The photo is straightened, and depending on the option you chose, any empty edges created are automatically filled.
  

The Straighten tool has an enhanced option to automatically fill the edges with relevant image data intelligently, instead of filling in background color or transparent pixels.

The Autofill edges option is available only in the Grow or Shrink and Original Size modes. Before you draw a line to enable image straightening, select Autofill edges. When you draw the line, any gaps created along the edges of the photo are automatically and intelligently filled.

The Straighten tool has an enhanced option to automatically fill the edges with relevant image data intelligently, instead of filling in background color or transparent pixels.

Before you draw a line to enable image straightening, select Autofill edges. When you draw the line, any gaps created along the edges of the photo are automatically and intelligently filled.

• To automatically straighten the image and leave the canvas around the image, choose Image > Rotate > Straighten Image. The straightened image contains areas of blank background, but no pixels are clipped.
• To automatically straighten and crop the image, choose Image > Rotate > Straighten And Crop Image. The straightened image does not contain areas of blank background, but some pixels are clipped.

When you scan several pictures in one file, you can automatically divide and straighten the scanned image into its component photos. To do this, the photos must have a clear separation between them.