Cropping an Image Using Paint

The excess background in the image below will be removed (cropped out) so the center object fills the photo:

This image has too much background area which will result in the subject of the picture, in this case the dog, becoming tiny when the photograph is scaled down. The best solution is to remove the unnecessary background area from the image using a graphic editing program. This guide demonstrates how to crop an image using Paint, a common graphic editing application that comes installed on most Windows PCs. Many graphic editors have a “crop” feature. Paint does not, and requires a few extra steps.

The first step is selecting the subject of the image. Use the Select tool which looks like a square made of dotted lines (see the highlighted tool in the left sidebar of the picture above). Click and drag with the mouse to make a selection. Several attempts may be needed to get the desired selection border correct. if necessary, click outside of the selected area so the selection border disappears and try again. Once the final selection is made, click Edit and then Cut from the menu bar:

The selected dog image is removed from the original picture and saved in the computer’s memory called the clipboard. As long as nothing else is cut or copied again, it will remain there until ready for use. The cut selection is pasted back as a new image in the third step:

Position the mouse pointer over the small square resize handle on the bottom right corner of the image. The pointer will turn into a double diagonal arrow (see the right bottom corner in the picture above). Drag toward the upper left corner as shown below until the image has almost disappeared (the idea is to make it smaller in size than the image on the clipboard):

Click Edit and then Paste from the menu bar as shown below:

The graphic pastes over the old image and automatically resizes the canvas to fit. This graphic will retain much more detail when scaled down. Be sure to use Save As… under the File menu and give the image a different name so the original is preserved.