Hi I’m Stephen Gilbert, and today I’ve written a brief guide on how to easily crop your images. Cropping is a term used when referring to the act of removing space, such as unwanted background items, from photos.

Definitions of cropping on the Web:
• Cropping is a method to remove parts of the left and right sides of an image and the word is used in the film, photo, graphic design and printing;
V. The cutting out of extraneous parts of an image, usually a photograph.

Cropping is an easy technique and is not at all hard to master. It’s quite simple really and can be used with several programs, ranging from the generic paint program that comes with every windows install, to the world renowned Adobe Photoshop.

Because paint is generic, and it should be installed on every windows computer, we are going to use this program for the guide.

Here is what to do, step by step:

1. Click on start menu, or hit the windows button
2. Locate Program Files, Accessories, Paint
3. If that doesn’t work, type paint in the search box.
4. Once paint is opened, Locate file in the top right corner, then Open
5. Locate the photo you wish to crop, and hit enter.
6. Now that the photo is uploaded into the paint program, select the "all select tool", It’s usually located in the top left corner, and is a dotted rectangle
7. Now that the rectangle tool, as we’ll call it, is selected take the tool and outline the portions of the photo one by one you would like to remove.
8. Once outlined, hit the DEL key.
9. Now take that same rectangle tool and outline the remaining image.
10. Right click, and hit copy
11. Now go back to File and hit New
12. Then press ctrl – P (hotkey for paste)
13. After the Image is pasted, resize the remaining White space to fit your image
14. Go to file, hit save, and save it to your desired location

Now your image is officially "cropped." Congratulations!

If you would like to use other image editing programs to crop, I suggest the free GIMP program. Or even the award winning Picasso. But that requires a bit more advanced knowledge of photo editing, and will take a little bit of learning.