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CrazyBusy
May. 7, 2009
PT&T: A Quick & Easy Way To Crop Photos Using The Rule Of Thirds (in Photoshop)
A photography tips post- can you believe it? Well, to be more accurate, this is more of a Photoshop tips post. Unless you count the part where I copied and pasted from Wiki to describe the rule of thirds. Anyway, I've been wanting to share this for a while. It's an easy little trick to crop your photos using the rule of thirds. What is the rule of thirds? From Wiki (since it's nearly 1am and I really should be headed to bed, not starting a new photography post- yes, in other words, I'm being lazy):
The rule of thirds is a compositional rule of thumb in visual arts such as painting, photography and design. The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections. Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would.
Here's what you do.
1. Open up the picture you want to edit in Photoshop. The school of thought about whether to crop before or after editing varies, but I crop after my editing is done. I save a version of my edited photo before I do any cropping so that in case I want to go back and have a certain size printed, all of my editing work is done on the full sized photo and all I need to do is crop to size. Here is the SOOC (straight out of camera) photo I will be working with. This is Gracie holding a Pacific Treefrog Alek caught in our yard the other day. Notice the boring composition? It's very centered. I'll tell you why I didn't apply the rule of thirds in-camera on this shot. Neither frog nor daughter were holding very still and I was shooting fairly wide open. I wanted to use the center focal point, which is supposed to be the most accurate in the camera. I wanted the frog's little face in focus and if I'd tried to use the rule of thirds in-camera by using at different focal point, I may have missed the focus. So here's the SOOC shot:
2. Next we're going to set up the grid tool so that when you open it, it will show up as a tic-tac-toe over your photo, slicing it into thirds. Go to Edit>Preferences>Guides, Grids & Slices. A window should pop up like the one below. Go down to the Grid section and change Gridline to "every 33.33%". Then hit okay. (you will not have to repeat this step after this- Photoshop will save this preference for you)
3. We are going to be working with layers here. So now hold down your CTRL button & hit the letter J. (CTRL+J) This is a shortcut to make a copy of the background into a new layer. Down in the right hand corner of your screen, you should notice you now have two layers of your photo. Like this.
4. You are going to use another shortcut now. This one will pop up the grid tool that we previously set up to put a tic-tac-toe grid on our photo. Hit CTRL ' (that is the apostrophe). CTRL and then the apostrophe. You should now see this on your photo.
5. Now you are going to click on the move tool (the little arrow in the upper right hand corner of your tools palette), and stretch and move and manipulate your photo around to get the composition you want. (or just hit CTRL + T to bring up that tool) Be sure to click on the "maintain aspect ratio" button so as not to distort your photo. This button looks like a chain and can be found at the top of the screen. You can see that I've clicked on it in the photo below.
6. Now my goal in this photo was to try and get the frog's face on one of the intersecting lines on the rule of thirds grid, but I did not want to chop any part of Gracie's fingers. I didn't leave enough room for this in the SOOC shot, so the frog's face wasn't exactly where I would've liked it. Cest la vie. This is my final crop. Once you are happy with your crop, click on the check mark button to finalize it.
7. Now flatten your picture by either hitting CTRL + E or right clicking on the background copy of your photo in the layers palette and choosing "flatten image". Now save a copy of your photo (choose "save as" so you do not overwrite the original) and that's it! You can download and use my free "resize for the web" action here, if you'd like. Makes posting to the web quick and easy. BE SURE TO READ the instructions first.
Here's the photo before cropping:
Here's the photo after cropping:
And maybe next time I'll show you how I change the color of the frames...
(can someone please tell me why I decided to out-of-the-blue do a photography post at this time of night and when I'm still stuck on dial-up? what was I thinking?! yawn...) |
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("Pets" entry)
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tricia 
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May. 7, 2009 - I love it!
Have a blessed day!