...just a little something....: How-To Crop and Specifically Size Your Photos for Mini-Books and Scrapbooking

Jun 29, 2013

How-To Crop and Specifically Size Your Photos for Mini-Books and Scrapbooking

Earlier this week, I wrote a quick post for you about using Pic-Tap-Go for some quick photo editing on the go, you can find that article here.

Today, I have a post for you about how to crop and resize your photos for use in mini-books, layouts or even cards. You might have noticed, but lately, I've been enjoying making scrapbook pages and mini-books with my My Favorite Things stamps and Die-namics.

For a while I struggled with what size to print my photos in order to make them fit into my mini books, or how to get them to match up perfectly with a Die shape I had in mind, so today I have a little how-to for you on cropping and resizing your photos.

I do my editing in either Photoshop Lightroom (for portraits) and my resizing in Photoshop Elements. If you use a different program, my guess is you can find similar options in your own editing software. This is just the way I’m familiar with it.

If I want to crop my image to a particular size let’s say 2 x 3 or 2.75 square, I can easily crop to a particular size in Elements.

Select the crop tool and then click in the particular dimensions you need for your layout. Do you see where I've input the special size I want to limit my photo to?

Now you need to prepare the image for printing. If you’re using an online photo company then you need to be uploading “standard” sizes.” What I want to do is keep the final size of the image the same, but make it print onto a standard sized print.

Select "Image" then "Resize"then “Canvas Size”

Now I’ll make the dimensions 6 width and 4 height. It will add the white border all around my image. Once I print them, then I just do a quick trim and voila, it's exactly the same size I needed...