Creation Station
Janneke Smit
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Everything but the kitchen
sink table.
Imagine …
You created the perfect layout and you cannot wait to show it in your online gallery, or even submit it to magazines for possible publication.
If you are like me, you find taking a picture of your project a lot easier than scanning your layout in two or even four parts and having to “stitch” these parts all together in your photo editing software.
But taking a perfectly straight photo is not easy and if you do not want to cut off anything from the edges of your project, chances are that your lovely kitchen table (or in my case the patio concrete) will be in the image as well. However, with a few simple steps you can straighten your images and crop out everything in the background so you can present your projects more professionally (which most editors will certainly appreciate).
How do we go from here: to here?
I will start with how to do this in Photoshop CS3 and older versions. Open the photo of your project. Select your crop tool from the tool box. At the top of your screen you enter the size and resolution you want for your cropped image. In this example I used 500px wide, 500px high and 72 pixels/inch, but in general you may want to enter a larger size and resolution. Click and draw a rectangle around your project; ‘marching ants’ will appear around your selection. Now at the top of your screen make sure the perspective checkbox is checked; here is where the magic happens.
Draw the corners of your selection area in towards the layout so that the ‘marching ants’ completely line up with the edges of your project. You may want to zoom in and fine tune your selection. To zoom in quickly press CTRL+ a couple of times.
When the ‘marching ants’ completely line up with the edges of your project just hit “Enter”. Your image is perfectly straight, in the size you want and everything in the background is gone:
In case you do not have the perspective checkbox option I will show you how to straighten your projects in a slightly different way. Instead of adjusting before we crop, we adjust after we have cropped the layout.
For the second example I used Photoshop Elements 4.0. Open the image from your digital camera. Select your crop tool from the tool box. At the top of your screen you enter the size and resolution you want for your cropped image. In this example I used 500px wide, 500px high and 72 pixels/inch, but in general you may want to enter a larger size and resolution. Click and draw a rectangle around your project; ‘marching ants’ will appear around your selection. Try to get as close to the project as possible, without going over the edges of your project.
Hit enter or click the green check to commit
Now we still need to get rid of the distracting background (kitchen table, patio, etc …). Make a layer from the background by selecting Layer > New > Layer from background, or right-click on the thumbnail in the layers palette and select Layer from background. Click OK to create the layer.
We are going the stretch out the image so it will fit perfectly: Go to Image > Transform > Distort.
Grab a corner of the layer and drag it outside the edge so that the corner of the project fills up the corner of the layer. Repeat this for all the corners.
Hit enter to commit. Flatten the image and you are done.
Follow these few simple steps and your project quickly looks much better!
After this you may still need to adjust the color, brightness and other things, but that is something we can talk about another time.
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