For scrappers, the act of cropping is pretty standard behavior. . . . and that’s explains all those pieces of paper all over the place! But did you know how easily you can get similar results without ever reaching for scissors or for your cropping tools?

We’re aware that scrapbookers know all about how to crop photos after they’re printed, right? In fact, it’s all that snipping away that earned us the nickname “croppers!”

One of the most common mistakes amateur photographers make when taking a photo is to stand too far away, and not to visually fill up the frame of the photo as much as they can. In fact, it just makes what you do want to see that much smaller. If you’re printing in 4x6” size, doesn’t it look better when the focal point of your photo is something close to that final size? And not reduced to a small little area in the middle, begging to be trimmed? Or, sometimes there’s something you didn’t intend to capture included in your photo! A lamp-post coming out of the top of someone’s head, for example . . . another good reason to crop!

If you were cropping by hand, you would cut out the excess. If you were to crop digitally, you could crop with your computer instead! Every photo software program out there has a simple way for you to crop. Play with it a little bit, see just how you want it, by clicking and dragging it till it’s where you like it. Only print it in the size you want, after it’s corrected. No scissors needed, but you do need to use your computer.

There’s yet another way to crop and you don’t even need a computer. Place a flash card into a PictureMate and print an index card to look them over. If you see a photo that you think could benefit from cropping, test out how best to crop it just by clicking on the cropping option. Print again, and look what you get: a preview sheet showing you how the photo would look cropped in various ways. Pick the crop you like best, according to the number on the sheet, and select that number to print. Presto! An instantly improved print! Look at it before and after cropping.

So why leave parts of your photos all over the floor? Print it already cropped, and you’ll end up with not only a much better photo, but more of the best part of it to use in your layouts!