Watch the video above then read the instruction below which document the actions taken in the video. The video above is intended as a visual indicator of where to go next, the detail of the tutorial is contained within the textual content of the page below:

More often than not your image may be perfectly composed within the a section of the image leaving the rest redundant, this may be within a photograph or within a piece of graphical work where you simply created too much canvass intentionally to give yourself a generous working area. In these circumstances we will need Crop our image down to size that better suits the composition we are chasing.

To start select: The Marquee Tool within the lefthand toolbar.

Right this is a nice easy action that is very quick to execute but if worth dealing with in a short tutorial as this is something that you will do very often and probably to most of the images you create.

In the video above I am cropping an image of the Pagoda at Roundhay Park. The original image works well I feel but if I were to use it within a website or printed media there is far too much extra space around the image. The actual subject matter would be lost within it environment, to resolve this I am going to crop off some of the sky and the trees to the left, I want to also lose some of the foreground but keep enough to retain the lead in to the picture.

You will probably have noticed that I crop the image twice in the video above, this isn't a required way of working but for me it works as in the first crop I am focusing on removing the trees to the left of the image. After the first crop the image is deliberately out of balance to the left as I have left too much image on the right. This way I can focus the amount I want to remove from the left and get that correct and on the right I have enough excess image to go in for a second go on the right. You may be able to get your image perfectly composed within the select area with a single crop but I often employ this technique just to ensure your get the balance you are after.

That's it, nice and simple.

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