Quickly Crop to a Shadow
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Written by
Gregory Scot Collins
Friday, 29 May 2009, 8:21 AM
This article has been tested to work with the following products and versions. No guarantee of compatibility, with or without modification, is offered for products or versions other than those listed.
- Photoshop CS3 (Adobe)
IN THIS ARTICLE:
When getting a screen capture in modern operating systems and applications, shadows often come into play. Traditionally, you might try to zoom close in and set your crop based on slight color variations, looking for pixels that are white and those slightly off white. However, this is cumbersome and a complete waste of time. You can quickly and easily crop to a shadow without any of the fuss.
Begin with a proper capture
To get a good crop, you must begin with a good capture. That means making sure there's no clutter around your target image. To do this, you move your window so that the edges and shadows do not cross other extraneous visual items. This can easily be achieved through the use another application, such as a web browser or text editor, as seen in Screenshot 1. If your final crop should match to a specific colored background, you can setup a blank web page with that color as the background. In this case, I just needed a white background, so I chose Notepad.
Perform a rough crop
Once you are setup, capture the screen however you like and paste it into Photoshop and crop it roughly around the item of interest, far enough away from the shadow to not cut through it while eliminating unneeded visual data, as shown in Screenshot 2.
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