Sunday, June 26, 2011

CoffeeShop Cropping Tip



As you probably know, there are usually multiple ways to do most everything in Photoshop and Elements.  I wanted to show you one of the methods I use to crop away extra white space around a design element in PSE as seen above.  If you have the full version of Photoshop you can simply use Image, Trim,
but this is not an option in PSE (at least the older versions, it might be available in PSE8 or PSE9).

Anyone can try to select a design element using the crop or marquee tool, but it is difficult to crop all of the white out without removing parts of the image and trying to keep everything centered.  So I will show you a little trick.

I wanted to mention I used a beautiful brush from Pixels & Ice Cream for this tutorial.  

1. Open the logo/design element/etc. that has extra white space you wish to crop off.


2.  Select W to get the magic wand tool.  Make sure your settings on the menubar look similar to mine.


 3.  Click to select the white space around your design element.


4.  Shift-Ctrl-I (or Select, Inverse). 


 5.  Now your design element is selected.


6.  Image, Crop.  Then Ctrl-D to remove the "marching ants" selection.


Now all of the extra white space around your design elements is gone!


Simple, right? 

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5 comments:

  1. so... with all the extra white space gone,it can now be used as a png file? with no background? or am i confused? cause I dont really know what Im talking about... :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Did you know you can go to Image, Trim (in photoshop) and it does all that for you?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes! But Photoshop Elements users (at least the older versions) don't have that option. I try to write my tutorials for them. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. And Megan, if you delete the background layer and save it as a .png it will have a transparent background.

    ReplyDelete

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Rita