Digital Scrapbook Tutorials: Resizing and Cropping Photos

Hi Everyone

When working on a digital scrapbooking layout, you will often need to change the size of a photo to fit in just right with the layout. This is particularly true when you’re using a digital scrapbook quickpage. A quickpage is pre-designed digital scrapbooking page that has a transparent frame or frames where you can add your own photos. Since, with a quickpage, you are working with a layout that has fixed photos sizes, you need to change the size of your photos to fit into these sizes.

Actually, as easy and fast as it can be to create digital scrapbooking layouts using quickpages, one of the biggest challenges when using quickpages is getting your photos sized to fit and look good in the layout.

There are really two ideas, big concepts when you’re changing the size of an image. You can simply resize an image, which means that you are keeping everything in the image intact, but you’re changing the relative size of the image, the number of pixels the image contains. When you resize an image, you almost always want the image to stay in the same proportion. For example, a 6″x8″ image and a 3″x4″ are in the same proportion, or aspect ratio.

One reason to resize an image is to change the physical dimensions of the photo. So, you could resize a 6″x8″ photo to fit into a 3″x4″ frame.

Another reason to resize an image is to change its file size. For example, because large files can be cumbersome in online communications, you usually have to reduce the file size of images that you send via email or that you upload to a website. Often this means that you’ll be reducing the resolution of your photo by decreasing the number of pixels that make up your photo.

On the other hand, when you crop an image, you remove parts of the photo and cropping an image usually changes its proportion, its aspect ratio.

You can use cropping to eliminate parts of your photo that you don’t want or to change the focal point of your photo so that the true subject shines through. Used wisely, cropping can greatly improve a less-than-perfect photo.

Consider the photo below:

Actually, this is a great picture. But, we can use the crop tool to make sure that the focus is really where it should be:

I think that looks better, don’t you? The change is subtle, but it makes a big difference in defining the focus of the photo.

Another reason to crop a photo is to change it to a specific size. This is a technique you will often use when fitting photos into the fixed frame sizes of a digital scrapbooking quickpage.

For more information about resizing versus cropping in Photoshop Elements, see this post on the Texas Chicks blog. This post shows how to resize and crop in the software. And, there’s another great post at the alittlephotoshop blog that expands on this idea (and, gets a bit more technical) by talking about upscaling in Photoshop CS5.

Happy Scrapping!

Mary

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