Alright, we have one more image that I want you to open, so that we can check out one more wonderful cropping technique. I am going to the file menu. Choose “Open recent” and this time I am going to choose “Gallery Painting”.


You can go ahead and use the open command browse and bridge, whatever. The gallery painting image is inside the Lesson 5 folder, inside the Part 1 folder just all the other images.

Go ahead and open that guy up and I will press the “F” key once again to hide the background stuff. Now, what is going on with this is this is a painting in a gallery that we shot with a Canon Rebel and I am going ahead and zoom in just a little bit, so we can take in a little more. Now, let us say you do not only want to crop this image to a smaller size but what you really want to do is you just want to peel the painting out of the frame. You just want to crop out the painting and that is it. That means you want to do a perspective crop. Check this out. It is so cool.

Alright we start by getting the crop tool. Next, drag inside the image window. Just like you would anytime you are just sort of starting off for rough cropping boundary. It does not matter if it is really in the right place or not. I am going to drag it into a little better place. Now, turn on perspective. Go ahead and turn on that check box up here in the options bar. And I am going to drag this handles around now to different locations. I am going to press the “Shift” key just to make sure that these left and right edges are vertical. I am going to use the shift key to constrain the corner handles vertically.

Alright I am going to move this in a little bit. Basically, what the perspective option allows me to do is move the corner handles not the side handles but the corner handles independently of each other. I am going to drag up just a little bit, so we can see the bottom of the frame. I am going to shift drag this corner handle down. Shift drag this corner handle down. So, in other words my right edge is perfectly vertical, my left edge is perfectly vertical and the bottom and top edges are at slight angles. Thanks to the perspective function up here in the check box.

Now, drum roll please. I am going ahead and accept this crop boundary by pressing the “Return” key here in the Mac or the “Enter” key on the PC. And look what it does. It lifts at image completely out of its frame. Gets rid of any semblance of frame and goes in flattens this image. Now, if it turns out it looks too stretched like it does in my case, and this may happen. It could look a little more squat in this. It could look a little more stretched than this. You will never know. But if you end up getting something that looks stretched along these lines, go to the image menu. Choose that familiar image size command that we learned about it in the previous lesson.

However, instead of leaving the constraint proportions check box turned on, turn it off. And now I am going to set the height value. The height value is what I want to change. I am going to set it percent and I am just going to eye ball it. I am just going to say well she looks awfully tall and thin. I guess I want to keep about eighty percent of the current height. Keep all the width and then I am going to click “OK”. And that ends up making the image a much better size, totally winged that one, could be different for you. You will never know. Anyway, it lifts the picture out of the frame. Gets rid of all the distortion, it does this amazing, beautiful job using the perspective check box combined with the crop tool inside Photoshop CS2.