Part 4 Macro - Cropping
	Cropping photographs is purely a personal thing. You have to do what feels right for you. In creating pictures for Ron, the Rule of Thirds is usually not possible. If you can manage it, then do it. I’m using an old version of Paint Shop Pro. For those who have other graphics programs, the technique is the same across the board. I will be using the following tools (not necessarily in this order). Crop, Resize, Copy, Paste and Merge. So you will need to find out how to do that in your programs. Most of the key strokes I mention should be universal.
		The top picture is was made out of the two pictures below. It’s nice to see two pictures together for comparison. Here is how I did it.
		Using my crop tool I put the cursor on the first picture then holding down the mouse button dragged diagonally until I got the area I wanted. Once this box is drawn you should be able to move it around and or make it bigger or smaller to center it. I took about 1/3 more than I would end up using. After making the borders of the area I wanted to crop out of the pictures, I double clicked inside the area and the picture was cropped.
		After cropping both pictures and zooming them to 1:4. I noticed that the subject on the left was larger than the one on the right and it would have to be resized to match the subject size of the picture on the right. I’m not referring to the actual size of each picture, but to the cotyledons in the picture.
		As I previously stated, I prefer to work in percentages rather than pixels. It makes resizing photographs much easier. Make sure both pictures are zoomed to the same size. Click on the picture you want to resize and open the resizing window. I chose to reduce the larger picture at 80% of the original. You may have to do this a number of times until you get it right. If you resize a picture and it doesn’t match the subject size of the other, do Control Z to undo what you just did and try again. Just make sure the picture you are working on is zoomed to the same size as the other. Once the size was correct, I cropped each picture again to get rid of the excess around it.
		I then did Control N to create a new picture. When you hit Control N a window should come up giving you options for picture size. Mine is set to 8 x 10.
		Once my new empty image is up, I click on the first picture that was cropped and resized and did Control C for copy. I then clicked on the new empty picture and pasted it into it as a new layer which is Control L for PSP. I did the same with the second picture as well. When you paste what you copied into the new picture, you can move around what you just pasted to where you want it. I then closed the cropped & resized pictures. I was asked if I wanted to save it. I said no because I then would always have the unaltered originals.
		The next step was to merge the two pictures into one. You will need to find the Merge feature on your program. On PSP it is under Layers. Once you find it, choose Merge All or Flatten. You should end up with a white back ground and a whole new picture. I then cropped the photograph again, you can see the borders inside the new picture.
		This new picture is 8.6 MBytes. Too large so I reduced it again until it was less than 2 MBytes.
		Now you want to name and save the picture. When you create a picture inside a graphics program, the new picture is not a jpg. It usually is in a format specific to the program you created it in. What you will need to do is save it as a JPG. When you click on save as you should see a dropdown box underneath the File Name box. Click on that and find JPG. Choose JPG, name your picture and click save.
		And here is your finished product!
		What I would like you to do now is take two pictures and stitch them together into a third picture.
		Part 3