Need a Photoshop/GIMP tip - cookie cutter

pickarooney

This is probably really simple, but I have no photo editing skills to speak of.
I want to be able to cut out a part of a photo of a fixed size and repeat the process for a large number of photos. Essentially I need to crop out all but 100x800 pixels from a photo. I'd like to be able to do this my moving an area of that size over the photo so I can click to select it, like pushing a cookie cutter into some dough, as opposed to fiddling about with resizing and cropping.

Dorcha

If you’re using The Gimp, simply click on the rectangular selection tool in the Toolbox, then position your pointer at the top left hand corner of where you want to cut and drag it down to the bottom right hand corner of your cut. After that you can drag the selection box around to position it. You can set exact measurements by altering the values in the text boxes under the “Size” label, and above it you can position your box even more accurately by setting values in the text boxes under the “Position” label. You can choose to do your measuring in pixels, millimetres, inches etc.


Click on “Image” above the main picture area and in the drop-down list click on “Crop to selection”. Your picture will be cropped.

Edit:I see that you want to crop with the same size without having to re-measure. I don’t know if The Gimp has that facility, but there is a free program called PhotoFiltre that has:


http://photofiltre.en.softonic.com/download


With PhotoFiltre, simply draw your selection box around the area you want. Then you click on “Selection” and from the drop-down menu, click on “Save shape”. When you want to use it on a new picture, click on “Load shape”. It will be called “Selection01.pfs”. You crop your picture by clicking on “Image” and in the drop-down menu on “Crop”.