Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
bum, every song was marked with the Explicit warning. I listened to a 90-second preview
of the first track (which was featured in the original motion picture soundtrack for the
movie
Sorority Row
), and I immediately knew what kind of the music they did. Naughty,
naughty music. Anyway, while I was listening, and wincing from time to time as F-bombs
exploded all around me, I realized that someone at the iTunes Store must have the full-
time job of listening to each song and choosing the 90-second preview. I imagine, at this
point, that person has to be 100% completely numb to hearing things like the F-bomb,
the S-missile, and the B-grenade (which means they could totally do a stint as Joe Pesci's
nanny). But, I digress. The “
Scream of the Crop
”
title (which would make a great title for
a movie about evil corn) is almost ideal for this chapter, except for the fact that this chapter
also includes resizing. So, I thought, what the heck, and searched for “resize” and found a
song called “Undo Resize” by electronic ambient artist DJ Yanatz Ft. The Designers, and
it literally is an 8:31 long background music track with two European-sounding women
whispering the names of menu commands from Adobe products. Stuff like “Select All,”
“Fill,” “Distort,” “Snap to Grid,” and so on. I am not making this up (I listened to the free
90-second preview). It was only 99¢, which was a bargain for 8+ minutes of menu com-
mands set to music. Normally, this many minutes of menu commands set to music would
be more like, I dunno, $1.29 or so.
Basic Cropping for Photos
Adobe completely overhauled cropping in Photoshop CS6, and it was a big improvement
(it was long overdue, since aside from a few minor enhancements, cropping had been es-
sentially unchanged since Photoshop 1.0). Here, we'll cover the basic garden-variety crop-
ping (and a new way of cropping), but since there are many different ways to crop a photo
in Photoshop (and different reasons why you'd use one over another), we'll cover them all.
If you're a Lightroom user, you'll be right at home with this cropping, because it works
more like Lightroom's cropping.
Step One:
Press the letter
C
to get the Crop tool and you instantly see the first improvement over
previous versions of the tool: you don't have to drag the cropping border out over your
photo—it's automatically added around your image for you (yay!). Now, just grab one of
the corner or side handles and start dragging inward to start cropping (as shown here) and it
crops in toward the center of the image (the area to be cropped away will appear dimmed).
If you want to keep the image proportions the same in your crop (I usually do), just press-
and-hold the Shift key while you drag any of the cropping handles. Also, you can reposi-
tion your image within the border by clicking-and-dragging on it.
