The one on the left is before lightening and using the lighten brush, and the one on the right is after lightening and using the lighten brush. Just little short swipes with the mouse is what I do. What I do with this tool is sort of make small swipes at the shadows around the bracelet to not only lighten them up a bit, but to smooth them out a little bit too. Next choose the lighten/darken tool from the left hand menu and use these settings.
You want to lighten things up a bit without making the photo look washed out anywhere along the bracelet (such as the crystal bead areas). Just remember to experiment when you do this step. When you're done there, click on Adjust - Brightness and Contrast and brightness/contrast from the menu above. Don't worry about the speckled areas close to the bracelet. Be careful not to paint over your bracelet image. Just use your paintbrush tool with the foreground set to white and "paint" over those spots. There may be some gray speckled areas around the edges that you missed with the background eraser. You can "check" your work this way as much as you need to before moving on. If you notice a lot of missed erasing around the edges of the bracelet, click undo in the menu above and erase some more. Then click on Layers / Merge All (flatten) and your background should now be white. Keep going until you have erased all that you want to erase. Try clicking once here and there to erase rather than dragging the eraser around the image.
Then move to another area outside the bracelet and click. Start erasing the background by clicking once in the middle of the bracelet.
Then click on the background eraser tool and use these settings. Then click on Adjust / Sharpen to sharpen up just a little bit. I resized to 450 pixels for this tutorial. Then click on Image / Resize and resize the image to whatever your larger photo size would be. Then click on Image / Crop To Selection in the top menu. You should see the dancing ants when you do. A crop rectangle appears, showing you how the picture will appear when cropped to the selected aspect ratio.Click on the selection tool and draw around the the bracelet. From the menu that appears, select Aspect Ratio, then click the ratio that you want. Click Picture Tools > Format, and in the Size group, click the arrow under Crop. How do you crop around a picture?Ĭlick the picture. On the PICTURE TOOLS FORMAT tab, click Crop > Crop to Shape, and then pick the shape you want. Select the picture (or pictures) that you want to crop.
If you want to change the outline of a picture and make it a shape (like a circle or a star), use the cropping tools on the PICTURE TOOLS FORMAT tab. How do I crop a square picture into a circle? Click a triangle to commit the diagonal crop. You can experiment with different triangles, such as one that shows more of the top left corner of the picture versus one cropping out that area and leaving more of the bottom right. If the object isn’t inside the frame you can go Object > PowerClip > Center Contents (or one of the other placement options).Ĭlick one of the triangle options, which will give you a diagonal crop. Then click on the shape you want to crop the object to.