Crop and Frame

This is an easy exercise. We will learn to crop (= cut a specific area of an image) and frame the cropped image.

Step 1. Select an image. We will choose the same Tahiti island image as in the Duotone exercise.



Step 2. Choose the area you want to frame. This is the area we have to crop. To crop the area, select the cropping tool in Photoshop. This is a dotted rectangular icon in the toolbox. It's called a rectangular marquee. Select the area by your mouse by clicking on the left button from one corner of the selected area to the diagonally opposite corner.

We selected the dotted area shown below:

Step 3. Select Image > Crop to completely cut ("crop") the area we need to frame. The unselected areas will be eliminated. The cropped area is shown below:

Step 4. Now that we have successfully cropped the image, we can now place the frame. Select Image > Canvas Size. You will be shown the Canvas Size window with several options.

In this example, we chose to measure the image and canvas in pixels (by selecting pixels in the area beside the Width selection box).

Then we clicked "Relative". This will ensure that any changes will be the same for the width and/or height.

We anchored the picture to the Center.

Then we specified a width and height of 4 pixels with the canvas extension color as White.

The result would be a thin white frame bordering the cropped image.

Step 5. We now experiment a bit and try to put two more frame colors. So we repeated step 4 twice:

a) Height and Width = 40 pixels; extension color is Green #2C8825 on the Color Picker. But you can choose your own shade of color ;-)

b) Height and Width = 60 pixels with extension color Black.

The result of this 2 iterations is shown below.

We now save the new cropped and framed image. The result:

Try experimenting on the Canvas Size options to see the various effects on your chosen image.