Creative Cropping in Photoshop
by Christine Gundersen

Here's a fun photo treatment, to take one photo and make it look like several photos that you cut up and pieced together. Start with a picture of your choice. I am going to use this one of a flower in a water garden, that I took when we were in Hawaii.



There are a couple of different ways to do this, but I am going to show you a cheater way that will make it so EASY! :D
First, add your picture to a new canvas and size it to the approximate size you would like the picture to fill. Next add a stroke to the picture by clicking on fx down at the bottom of your layers palette. I used black here. You can choose the color you want to have at the end or you can just use a temporary one,
because as you will see, there are many different options once we have your picture all chopped up! Once you have your stroke, use your rectangle selection tool to make your first rectangle. Choose the part you want to be the focal point. Notice the black stroke and the selection rectangle in Figure 2.

Now make a new layer with that selection, from the picture. The easiest way is to do ctrl+j. You will now have 2 picture layers: your bottom layer with the whole picture and the next layer with just the
part you duplicated. Notice that because you put your stroke on BEFORE you duplicated, the copy also has the stroke on it, so it is easy to see what you are doing. Figure 3.

Continue cropping until you have the arrangement that you would like. Remember to click on the main
photo layer each time before hitting ctrl+j. Once you have a nice arrangement, you can either wink off the eye on the full picture or delete it. Figure 4

Now for the really fun part! Try changing all of the small pictures to black and white, except one, or
remove the stroke and make a mat on a different layer so you can have fatter edges without the rounded corners of a stroke, or any other interesting thing you can come up with! Here's a variation that I did, then I made it into a layout, using my new The Zing of Spring kit.
Have fun with this and PLEASE let me know if you make a page with this tutorial, I would LOVE to
see it!

©2009 Christine Gundersen