Preset crop size - how to?

[Bareboats]

Hi there! I am new to this forum, new to PaintshopPro Ultimate, and relatively new to photo editing … though I do know a little bit , but that was all Photoshop stuff. I had an older version that I owned. I can’t deal with Adobe’s subscription nonsense, so have made the change to Corel.

I have a website that uses three different photo sizes, the most common of which is 520 pixels x 344 pixels. I lost everything I owned in Hurricane Irma in September in the British Virgin Islands and am just now trying to get my business back up and running. I have managed to get myself resituated in Canada now, have bought a new computer, camera and of course Corel PaintshopPro.

Though my old camera was a Nikon, it was a much better camera than the new Nikon I have now … and for whatever reason, the raw photo sizes are different. I can no longer just resize my photos and upload them to my website without having the whole site affected by a photo size change.

Here’s what I’d like to know:

Is there a way to “preset” the crop tool to 520 x 344, overlay the crop rectangle on my photo and move it to the best spot, then copy and paste it to a new blank page of the same size? I know this is probably lacking in the correct technical terms, but I am self taught and just “get by” with my photo editing.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I have a few thousand photos to edit, and I am not looking forward to the possibility of having to do this on a trial and error basis, one by one. It will take me months of trying to crop each shot to the correct size!

I hope I have explained that clearly enough.

[TimW]

Bareboats; I'm sure there are other ways to do exactly what you need. I find keying in the pixel dimensions in the tool properties and applying that to the first image. For subsequent images, I then go to <Presets> & click on <Last Applied>. This will repeat the crop settings you did on the first image & you can move the crop rectangle around as needed. Hopefully this part of the Crop Tool works for you in PSP 2019 similar to my X8 version.

[Bareboats]

Thank you soooo much TimW ... I will give this a shot. Old dog, new tricks ... the learning curve is somewhat overwhelming right now but with super fast help like this, I just might get there!

Again, many thanks!

[Bareboats]

Thought I would let others know another method I was able to find on Youtube. Since there are other things I often have to do to my photos, such as get rid of extraneous space on the edges of my shots, rotate the images to fix horizons before I crop or resize ... this works very well and does exactly what I wanted to do:

1. Go to "image", select "resize" and change width to whatever you need your specific width to be.
2. Click on "selection" tool and then go to "custom selection" on the top ribbon, and change "bottom" ... which is your photo height. Leave other sizes as is.
3. Using the "move" tool and the right mouse button, move your rectangle to select the area you want in your photo.
4. Go to "image" and click on "crop to selection". You're done!

The tutorial I found is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDusGLmD4qI

If anyone knows of an even faster and accurate way to do this ... I am all ears. I am looking at a LOT of photo editing in the next few weeks, so would be grateful for any and all suggestions.

[ehume]

There is a very simple way to affect custom crop size. After you resize your photo to whatever, the crop tool can be set to "Free Form." Then tell it how wide and how tall you want your crop window to be. This is PSP 2018, but you get the idea. It's at the top of the image.

[JoeB]

@Bareboats,

If I understand you correctly, you want your final image to be 520 pixels wide and 344 pixels high. And to achieve this you want a faster method of doing the following steps from the tutorial you posted:

1) Resize image to 520 pixels wide while maintaining the aspect ratio (i.e., the height will change in correct proportion to the width);
2) Then create a custom selection that is 520 pixels wide (i.e., the width of the resized image) and 344 pixels high. I have to assume that any images you are working with will, when resized to 520 pixels wide, be of sufficient height size that they will be at least 344 pixels high or more when the rezise to 520 pixels wide is completed while maintaining the correct aspect ratio so as not to distort the image.
3) Select the Mover tool so that you can then move that selection marquee vertically to choose the part of the image you want to display that will be 344 pixels high.
4) Crop the image so that it is now both 520 pixels wide and 344 inches high.

If that is correct, then a script can be created and bound to an icon and placed on a convenient toolbar that will save you from having to access all of those commands from menus, etc. When run (by clicking the icon), it will automatically resize the image to 520 pixels wide and automatically select whatever height is required to maintain the aspect ratio. It will then automatically create a selection on that resized image that is 520 pixels wide (the width of the image) and 344 pixels high, and will also automatically select the Mover tool which you can use (with right mouse dragging) to move that selection down to your desired position. Once you have done that, clicking the script's button again will crop the image to the selection. So you would be able to achieve your desired sized and cropped image with just 2 clicks. If you have several images open, after the first one is cropped then just put focus on another image and run the script again to have it resized and cropped, and continue doing that with all open images.

Would that be helpful?