Adventures in Cropping

how to crop and rotate an image in photoshop tutorial

Can you see any similarity between these two pictures?

You surely can.

The picture on the right-hand side is a part the picture on the left.

 

When I take photos at home (mostly in my kitchen) I usually have loads of time to concentrate, think things through and snap a picture whose composition looks optimal to me.

But when I shoot outside things happen a bit faster in comparison to what I’m used to.

Well, nobody said life was going to be easy.

But instead of asking people and animals one by one to move more slowly for the sake of my photography I chose another tactics.

When I see something worth capturing I rather concentrate on preserving the activity itself than on an eye-pleasing composition of the picture.

I leave that till later.
how to crop and rotate an image in photoshop tutorial

This is the original picture – straight out of camera.

No editing at all.

I liked it but I thought that the funny action in the foreground deserved a little more detail.
how to crop and rotate an image in photoshop tutorial

So I clicked the crop tool from the left-hand tool palette and then selected the area of the picture that I wanted to keep.

Next I decided that a slight angle could work here.

So by holding the little square…

Not!

Not!

Not!

My hand just slipped (I was drinking mulled wine that evening, I think) and for the first time in my life I found out that you can rotate a crop – the little squares in the corners of the rectangular selection are meant for that.

I was amazed.

And then I clicked ENTER to finish the crop.
how to crop and rotate an image in photoshop tutorial

This is the new selection.

It looks much more funny this way.

 

I love it when accidents like this happen.

Has it ever happened to you, too – learning new things in photography by accidents?

Isn’t it awesome?

 

13 thoughts on “Adventures in Cropping

  1. 1
    ingrid says:

    YES! I love when that happens. Thanks for the new info. 🙂

    Happy Friday & picture taking!
    ~ingrid

  2. 2
  3. 3

    If you don’t mind me asking what program are you using to crop your wonderful photo’s?

  4. 4
    Martin Guarderas says:

    have you used content aware on photoshop yet if not you should you tube content aware photoshop its the most amazing tool ever.

  5. 5

    Sometimes we all don’t know the effect we have on other people .

    Here is the effect you had on me . You inspired me to post some of my work on a web site. I have not uploaded a ton of pictures but enough to publish. I am working with CS3. But man that tool makes me wanna upgrade.

  6. 6
  7. 7
    Rae says:

    Oh I “accidentally” figure things out all the time. I’m the kind of person who likes to mess with things until they suit me. I do this for almost everything. Unfortunately, this often makes me think, “oh, that looks awesome…. now how did I do it…..”

  8. 8
    Gulshoda says:

    Hi Zoom Yummy!
    I love you blog! Thanks for sharing!
    I have a question, what kind of Photoshop is it on top? What kind of Photoshop do you use?

    I would be very thankful for the answer.

    Best regards, from Germany

    Gulshoda

  9. 9
    Gulshoda says:

    Thank you so much!

    I’m going to order it. I’m new in Photography world, so I didn’t know how, what to use!

    Greetings from Germany
    Gulshoda

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