How to crop image on Mac without third party software? Difficult For new Mac Users or are you editing picture at First time like Crop image in square, Circle, Elliptical shape, Without any this party software. You can do on Mac Preview image tools. But through Apple’s Preview tools you can’t. I used the cropping tool to remove the footnotes (which took up much of the page in some cases). I would like to fit as many paragraphs as possible on a page. Right now i have 20 separate cropped pages. I would like to be able to use a free form / lasso crop tool for video. [ eg use the lasso to select a person and mask out all the background to replace with another.
Cropping photos – cutting them down to a size you prefer – can easily be done in as little as a few seconds with a basic photo editing tool. Whether you need to cut out unnecessary visual aspects or change the shape or aspect ratio of the photo, cropping is the way to go for quick results.
Below, you'll learn how to crop photos on a PC or Mac using your computer's respective built-in photo editing program. You'll also learn how to crop photos on a mobile device using a free photo editing app.
It's easy, fast and actually pretty fun once you get the hang of it.
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Crop a Photo As a Rectangle on Your PC
If you're a PC user running on Microsoft Windows, you can use a built-in program called Microsoft Paint to do your cropping. You can find Paint under All Programs by accessing the Start menu.
To open your photo in Paint, click File > Open and select a file from your computer. Now you can start cropping.
Click the crop selection button in the top menu, identified by the rectangular crop icon that has a Select label at the bottom. Once clicked, it should turn a light blue color.
Now when you move your cursor over your photo, you can click, hold and drag out the rectangular crop outline over your photo. When you let go of your mouse, the crop outline will still be there and you'll be able to click on any corners or mid-points (marked by the white dots) to reposition it.
If you want to start over, simply click anywhere on the photo and the crop outline will disappear. When you're happy with your crop outline, click the Crop button in the top menu to finish the cropping.
You can also adjust image sizes while in Microsoft Office.
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Crop a Photo As a Free Form Selection on Your PC
As an alternative to rectangular cropping, Paint also has an option for free-form crop selections. So if you wanted to crop out the entire background of the photo in the example above, you could slowly trace around the hand and flower using the free-form crop selection to do it.
To use the free-form crop selection, click on the arrow beneath the Select label on the crop button in the top menu. From the drop-down menu, click Free-form selection.
Click anywhere on the photo where you want to start your free-form selection and hold it as you trace around the area you want to keep. Once you've made it back to your starting point (or simply let go), the crop outline will appear.
Click on the crop button to complete your free-form crop selection and the area of the photo outside the crop outline will disappear.
If you'd rather crop around the area of the photo that you want to get rid of, which can be much easier to do in some instances, you can select Invert selection from the dropdown menu when you click Free-form selection and draw your crop outline.
To get rid of the white space around the cropped area of the photo, click Transparent selection from the dropdown menu when you click Free-form selection and draw your crop outline.
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Crop a Photo As a Rectangle on Your Mac
If you're a Mac user, you'll have a program called Photos installed on your machine that allows you to do your cropping. To access it, click the Applications icon in the bottom menu, scroll down and click Photos.
Click File > Import to choose a photo from another folder to Photos if you need to or simply double click on an existing one in Photos to open it.
Click the briefcase icon at the top of the photo viewer to display the menu of editing options. Make sure the crop icon located at the far left of the editing options is set to square/rectangle. (If it isn't, click on the arrow to the right of the crop icon to select Rectangular Selection from the dropdown menu.)
Click and hold your anywhere on the photo. Drag it to see the cropping outline expand.
You can do this in one hold or alternatively let go of the hold on your cursor. The crop outline will still be there and you'll be able to use your mouse to click and drag any of the blue dots that appear on its sides and corners to adjust their lengths.
When you're happy with your cropping outline, click the Cropbutton in the top menu to crop the photo.
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Crop a Photo into a Circle on Your Mac
Photos won't allow you to crop a photo as a free-form selection like Paint does, but you can at least crop photos as circles or ovals. It's easy to do this with just one small change to the instructions given above.
With your photo open in Photos, click on the arrow to the right of the crop icon to select the Elliptical Selection. The crop icon should change to a circle.
Now when you go to crop your photo by clicking, holding and dragging your cursor across the photo, you'll see a crop outline in a circular shape. Just like the rectangular selection, you can let go of your cursor and click the blue dots to drag the crop outline around so you get the perfect fit.
Remember to click the Crop button in the top menu when you're done.
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Crop a Photo on Your iOS or Android Device
To crop photos on your mobile device, you can take advantage of countless free photo editing apps out there, but for the sake of keeping things simple we'll use Adobe's Photoshop Express app. It's free to download and use on iOS, Android and Windows devices, and no — you don't need to have an Adobe ID to use it.
Once you've downloaded the app and opened it, you'll be asked to give it permission to access your photos. After you do, the app will show you all your most recent photos stored on your device.
Select the photo you want to crop and then tap the crop icon in the bottom menu. A crop frame will appear over the photo and you'll be able to use your finger to drag the crop outline around the area of the photo you want to crop.
Alternatively, you can select from different crop frames for specific aspect ratios that fit certain social media posts. These include ones that fit Facebook profile cover photos, Instagram photos, Twitter post photos and more.
When you're done, you can save the crop by simply navigating to the next step using the other menu options at the bottom and top of the screen. If cropping is all you needed to do, just tap the save button (marked by the square with the arrow in it) in the top right corner of the screen to save it to your device or open/share it within another app.
Your Mac’s Preview app doesn’t just contain PDF-editing features. It’s a great little image editor, too. Preview offers basic tools for cropping, resizing, rotating, annotating, and otherwise tweaking images.
Just as QuickTime will never replace iMovie in spite of all its useful media editing features, Preview will never replace Photoshop or even iPhoto. But, for some quick and basic image editing, Preview is surprisingly useful.
Get an Image Into Preview
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Getting an image into Preview is easy. By default, you can simply double-click an image file and it will open in Preview. If you’ve changed your image file associations, you can Command-click or right-click on an image file, point to Open With, and select Preview.
You can also open the Preview app from the Applications folder, Launchpad, or by pressing Command + Space to open Spotlight Search and searching for Preview. From Preview, you can open the image file directly. Or, with Preview open, you can click File > New From Clipboard to import an image file from your clipboard. You can then edit the image and get it back onto your clipboard by clicking Edit > Copy.
If you’d like to take a screenshot and edit it, you can press Command+Shift+3 to snap a screenshot of your entire screen, Command+Shift+4 to snap a screenshot of a selectable area, or Command+Shift+5 to snap a screenshot of only the current window. The screenshot will be saved as a .png file on your desktop, and you can open it in Preview to begin editing it. (Or, you can hold Ctrl as you take a screenshot — Command+Ctrl+Shift+3, for example. Your Mac will save the screenshot to your clipboard, and you can import it into Preview with the File > New From Clipboard option.)
Rotate an Image
Rotating an image is simple. Simply click the rotate button on the toolbar near the top-right of the window one or more times. You can also click the Edit menu and click one of the Rotate or Flip options.
To save your changes, click File > Save. You can also click File > Duplicate to create a duplicate copy and save the edited image as a new file, keeping the original image before the edits were made.
To undo any changes, click the Edit menu and select Undo. To revert to the original image file before you began editing it, click the File menu, point to Revert To, and select the original image version.
Crop an Image
Cropping an image is also simple. Preview uses the rectangular selection by default, so you should just be able to start clicking and dragging. Click the Tools menu and select Rectangular Selection if this isn’t working as expected.
Click and drag anywhere in the image to select a rectangular section of the image. Click Tools > Crop afterward and preview will crop the selection, cutting out everything else in the image. As with any edit, click File > Save to save your changes.
Resize an Image
Select Tools > Adjust Size to bring up the Resize dialog, which will allow you to resize the image. It supports many measurement units, including pixels. By default, it will resize the image proportionally, maintaining the original aspect ratio to ensure the resized image doesn’t look stretched or smooshed.
Image-resizing tools like this one are useful for shrinking images so they don’t take up as much visible area or on-disk space. They’re not ideal for enlarging an image as the blown-up image will be lower-quality — for this reason, enlarging an image is almost never a good idea.
Annotate an Image
Oval Cropping Tool
Preview includes various image mark-up tools — the same ones that work in PDFs — which you can access by clicking the Show Markup Toolbar button near the top-right corner of the window. You can also click the Tools menu, point to Annotate, and select one of these tools in the menu.
Select a tool and it will replace the default “rectangular selection” tool. You can then click somewhere in the image to add text, draw a line, highlight an area, create a shape, or insert an arrow — whichever tool you’ve selected.
Adjust Color or Gamma
RELATED:Use Your Mac’s QuickTime App to Edit Video and Audio Files
The built-in Preview application also has a tool for adjusting the color levels or gamma of an image. Click Tools > Adjust Color to access it. Use the options on the pane that appears to adjust various color settings. The pane includes an overall color level graph you can modify as well as sliders for adjusting exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, temperature, tint, sepia, and sharpness. It’s useful for everything from fixing the color levels of an image to applying that old-timey sepia filter Instagram made trendy.
It doesn’t matter if you’re not sure what the options do — the image will update in the background as you adjust these sliders, so you can see a preview of your color adjustments in real time. You can figure out what the options do by playing with them.
Preview is a surprisingly powerful app. Not only can it view just a single image file at a time, it can view multiple images at a time and quickly cycle between them, producing a sort of slideshow. To do this, select multiple images in the Finder by holding the Shift key and clicking each. Next, Command-click or right-click on the images and open them in Preview. Preview will open with a sidebar showing a list of thumbnails for all the images you opened. Cycle between them using the arrow keys or by clicking the thumbnail images to quickly view all of them.
Image Credit: Quentin Meulepas on Flickr
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