Find photo within photo

- [Narrator] Hello, friends, and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode we are going to focus in on finding the photograph within the photograph. And we'll do that by exploring how we can crop and recompose an image using Photoshop. I'll also sneak in a few tips and tricks as well Alright, well, here I am in Bridge, and I'll tap the space bar key to go to full screen. And here is a very cute photograph of my niece, Eddy. And this is an image, which at least for me, works.

It's connected, or I'm connected with her. I love the look and feel of it. If I show you the original photograph captured on my iPhone, it actually isn't very good. Now, why is that? Well, a lot of times when I'm working with my iPhone I'm not paying enough attention to composition. I'm also not getting close enough. And here we can see she's too small relative to the frame. There's some distracting elements on the edge of a frame, and you wanna make sure you don't have those because your eye kinda gets snagged on those. And we just need to get closer to the subject.

So let's talk about a couple of different ways we could crop this image in order to improve it. To do that I'll open it up in Photoshop. And inside of Photoshop, I'm gonna zoom in to illustrate a point. Notice how when I zoom in on the picture, say right about here, all of a sudden, it looks like a better photograph compared to one which is a little bit more zoomed out. So basically, I need to find the photograph, which is really right about here within the photograph. So cropping isn't just about getting rid of excess things.

It's about really finding something within, which makes the image stronger. So first, let's do a traditional crop. We'll just grab the crop tool. And I'll make sure Delete Crop Pixels is turned off. And then I'm gonna go ahead and just bring this crop area down, and try somewhere right around there. Double click to apply that. I'll press Command + 0 on a Mac, or Control + 0 on Window's, which takes you to a zoom, right, which fits the entire image in view. So now we have a better version of the photograph, right? Because here we have little Eddy.

We're really kind of drawn into her, versus before we're sort of looking down at her. Now we're kinda looking at her eye level, which works a lot better. Another way that we might crop this image is to do the crop that we saw before, which was one, which was more of the vertical crop. And I'm just dragging the image around a little bit here to see if there might be just a subtle shift on this. I kinda like it right, actually, right kind of centered. I like how the curve of the bathtub is leading into it. We have her framed on the wall.

Nice, clean, and simple. Alright, well, let's say we wanna undo this crop. How do we do that? Well, we can go to the crop tool and activate it. And of course, we could drag this out to the different edges, but it becomes really tedious. Or we could say clear the crop or try to reset the crop, but we're not getting the whole image back. How do you get the image back? Well, what you can do is rather than using the crop tool, just go to Image, and then choose Review All. What will happen is it will then go to a canvas size, which reveals the entire original photograph.

So it overrides or removes the crop. And that is a great little tip. Write that one down. Image and then Review All. That is how you reset the crop and remove it completely. Okay, well next, let's look at another crop. This one a little bit more free form. So here if I go ahead and click and drag this in, and realize rather than horizontal, I kinda want a vertical crop. Tap the X key. That will flip that crop. You can see how it's now vertical. And I'm gonna bring this in. This is more what I decided to do with my final crop before.

Double click to apply that. And here you can see, we have this crop right here. If she isn't in the right place, just grab the move tool, and we can drag her around. Because remember, there's more of an image than what we're seeing here. It extends past the edge of this. So I can find just the right spot. Or you can reactivate the crop tool, and you can kind of customize this a little bit more here too, and then apply that. Alright, well, once you've found just the right position for your crop, next, you may wanna work on color and tone, which I wanna do. So really simple adjustment.

We'll use curves for it. I'm gonna brighten the image up a little bit. And so just do a little bit of brightening there. Go to the red channel. And in the red channel I'm gonna bring in a little bit of red. So add a little bit of kind of reddish pink to the image. I like the pastel color palette of this. And then the blue channel. If we drag up it goes blue, drag down it goes yellow. So just a smidge of warmth there, so dragging that down. So not an over the top adjustment, but one which just kinda adds a little bit of nice warmth and glow to the overall image.

Alright, well, there you have it, an example of how we can use cropping to find the image within the image, or the photo within the photo. As you look at your own images, try this out. Try to see if you can't use some of these techniques of cropping to really discover a better way to frame your photograph. And then, once you've done that, take this as a lesson. And go back to perhaps a before and after example like we saw here where you have the before. And say, okay, this one's better than this one.

Well, why? Well in this case, I was photographing a kid, and I was too high. So I needed to lower my camera position. And the other things is, I just included too much in the frame. So I needed to get a little bit closer. And one of the things that you can do is you can use this technique to really teach yourself how to work better when you're capturing images. And in doing that, it'll help you to create better photographs. Alright, well that wraps up a few tips for you for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And even more, I hope that you have a fantastic rest of your day.

I hope that it is full of creativity, and I hope you get out there and capture some great photographs. And I look forward to seeing you next time. Bye for now.