Crop a Photo at an Angle

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Monday, 23 June 2008 14:12

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You can use your Crop tool to add interest and movement to a photo. The technique itself is very short, but it can give you great results, like this:

Here's how to crop a photo at an angle.

Open a photo. This technique works best when you have a little extra room in the photo beside the subject.
Select your Crop tool.
Click and drag to draw a crop area.
With the crop area still selected, hover your mouse over the corner of the crop area. Click and drag to rotate. Be sure that none of your cropped corners leave the edges of your photo. When you are happy with the angle, double-click inside the crop area to commit.

Note: The rotation direction you use is actually the opposite of the way your subject will point after you crop . So rotating the crop area clockwise (say to 2:00), will actually place your subject pointing at 10:00. So you might need to test the crop a couple of times. I find that a counter-clockwise turn to between 10 and 11:00 has worked nicely. Too little angle and it’ll just look like a mistake.

How easy is that! :)

You should use this technique AFTER doing corrections like levels/curves, B/W conversion, and other color corrections.

Use this technique BEFORE sharpening, though. You always want to sharpen as your last step.

The best part of this is how well it combines with some of our other photo editing techniques.

Example 1

For example,

I converted the photo to black and white using our technique from last week.

Then I cropped using this week’s technique, rotating the crop counter-clockwise to about 11:00 before cropping it.

I applied a Smart Sharpen (PSCS2), but if you’re using PSE, use Enhance > Unsharp Mask. If you’re using PSCS, use Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.

Example 2

In this one, I cropped the photo from a horizontal to a vertical:

The only other editing I did here was a little brightening using Curves, and a sharpen, same as above.

Example 3

And lastly, this one combines several of our techniques. I started out here:

I used the Dreamy/Handtinted tutorial to give the photo that handtinted look.

Then I cropped it at an angle.

Then I added the grungy border mask (filling in the bottom layer with a white background).

Then I added text to the photo.

I ended here:

Now you can see that none of these photos were studio-quality portraits, but just snapshots of my kids. But using some of the techniques we’ve talked about before, we were able to make them into great photo creations. :) This is, of course, the Photoshop equivalent to holding your camera at a slight angle while you shoot. That way is preferable, because of how much extra room you need in the post-processing to get an angled crop. But for all my thousands of pics I took before I started doing this for some of them? This works great. It adds an energy and interest, activates the photo, and helps it feel more dynamic.

So your challenge this week is to take two or more of our photo techniques and wrap them up into a photo to improve it.

Can’t wait to see!

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of photos, I stumbled across this great little tip sheet from the folks at National Geographic for improving your adventure photos. But you know, these tips work great for chasing your kids or your dog around, too. :)