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I wonder if you've had an experience where you've shot an image in a horizontal or
landscape format only to find later on that you
perhaps wanted to fit the image into a frame that was say more square or maybe even more
portrait.
Well there's a couple of ways that we could actually change the format of an image in
order to get it to fit into that new frame. The
simplest way I guess would be to go and select the crop tool and then just go in and crop
holding down the shift key crop a square format around that image and so you end up with a
square image.
The problem associated with that is we lose some
of the detail that was in the original scene. I
guess we could also go in and double check that
it's not a background layer first of all and then go up to the image, then down to the
transform, then across to free transform. And
grab the image and actually drag the sides in
until we end up with a square format.
But of course what happens is that the whole of
the image is squished, I guess you could say, horizontally and so we end up with people
that look like they've been on a diet for too long,
because they're all tall and thin. So no we don't want to do that either.
Well in Photoshop Elements 8 what we have is a
new tool called the recompose tool. You can access it in a couple of different ways you
can grab it from underneath the crop tool as you
can see it here. And we get a little bit of
information shown to you about how to use the
tool when we first open it. If you choose to not
see this any more you can just hit the don't show again selection in the left hand section
of that dialog.
Or you can access the tool from under the image
menu. You can see it here, recompose.
So we select the recompose tool, notice that we
have the corner handles and the side handles just as we do when we're working with the
free transform tool. But up in the options bar
we have some other I guess features or controls
as well.
First of all we have a brush that we can select and we'll just increase the size of the brush
using the sideways square brackets. And we can
just brush over the parts of the image that we
want to mark as being important and therefore we
don't want to make any change to their I guess their format. So we're saying, okay this Then
when we come in and drag the side of the photo in notice what happens. The rest of the
information in the scene is actually being compressed but the section we marked as
important is retained at its original proportions. Fantastic. So were' able to actually
make a square format from a horizontal or landscape format image, simply by marking
the areas that we wish to keep and retain or
protect. Then using the recompose tool and the
handles on the edge of the image to actually drag the image in.
Let me cancel out of there for a minute and just
show you a couple of other things from the option bar.
We have the ability to select the eraser tool and erase away sections that we previously
marked for protection. And with the other tools
on the options bar we also have the ability to
mark particular areas for deletion when we're actually doing the resizing or the reformatting.
So we can just draw over a particular section of
the image with the red colored brush, or the deletion brush. That way when we actually
go in and start doing some changes that part of
the image will be deleted. So if there's something
in the image that you don't want to appear in
the recomposed photo, well that's definitely something you'd mark over with the red brush.
And notice one of the other options we have on
the options bar is the ability to select skin tones automatically. So if this was a full
color image well then by clicking on that select skin tones button it will actually
highlight the skin tones with the green brush you can come back in then and adjust those
highlighted areas using the brush to add to that
selection or add areas that have been painted green, or the eraser tool to remove different
parts that have been inadvertently been selected.
Finally we have the ability to adjust the image
using the presets we've got here, to specific sizes. So one of the very cool features to
do with the recompose feature or tool or function
in Photoshop Elements 8 is the ability for us to
go okay we want this image to fit on a five by
seven inch print so we can actually go and select the five by seven print option from
the preset and automatically the image will be
adjusted to that size. So that's a very cool way
for us to actually make sure we're resizing the
image to the size of the paper that we're working with rather than using the manual
drag in the corner or edge handles approach.