Cropping Images using Fireworks

Another way to reduce the size of an image is to crop or eliminate unwanted background areas.  The resized image of my family created previously,  is much smaller than   the original but perhaps still too large when actually all I  wanted was a picture of  my nephew Jeff  holding his sister Jessica. 

I will illustrate using Fireworks to crop Jeff and Jessica from my resized image.

• Load the resized image (JJJNan30.jpg) from the previous example into Fireworks. 
    
• Choose Edit > Crop Selected Bitmap near the bottom of the menu. The crop handles appear around the image.
    
• Drag the handles
    
• Adjust the crop handles until the bounding box surrounds the area of the bitmap image that you want to keep:
    
• To crop the bitmap image, double-click inside the bounding box or press Enter. Everything outside the bounding box is removed.
    
• To cancel the crop command, select Edit from the top menu, then undo.

• If you have trouble selecting the area to crop, here is an alternative technique.  

(If the above technique works for you ignore this.)  

• Open the image to be cropped. 

Select the marquee tool from the left side tool bar, then select the area you wish to crop by dragging the marquee around the area.  

The cursor is on the marquee tool in this picture.   

When the area you wish cropped is selected, Choose Edit > Crop Selected Bitmap near the bottom of the Edit menu.   Now press the enter key, or double-click inside the selected area.

Trimming the canvas:
You have now eliminated portions of the picture you did not want but, the file is the same size.  As a final step you must trim the unused portion of the canvas.     

Choose Modify > Canvas > Trim Canvas to automatically remove excess pixels from around the edge of the document.  (Short cut keys to trim a canvas are
CTRL +ALT+T )

Save the cropped image under a different file name. 

As in the resize example, you will use the Export Preview menu to save this cropped image as a jpg under a different file name.

Last updated on 02/20/2003  by L.M. Hicks