Cropping is simply cutting away the distracting elements in your photos. There are several techniques to achieve this look. Listed below are some tips to do so.

• Some of your photos you may want to use can have distracting backgrounds. You will need to crop out the elements that take the attention away from your subject.
  
  
• Some pictures may contain backgrounds of personal meaning. Look over your photos carefully before you crop them. Perhaps the photo contained a home where you grew up or a landmark from your childhood. You may want to leave these in your photo for your memories.
  
  
• The quickest and easiest way to crop photo is to use a straight edge. You can accomplish this by using a ruler, pencil and scissors. After you are done tracing the line with your pencil, be sure to clear off any residue left behind. You do not want to harm your photos in any way. If your budget allows, you can purchase a small paper cutter. This technique is the safest crop to use. If you use different shapes to crop photos, you may regret it later. Too many shapes can often make a page look busy and cluttered.
  
  
• Another way to save time and money is to over lap your photos. This can also add different styles to your pages.
  
  
• To add a little creativeness to your scrapbook you can crop your pages with decorative sheers. Cropping your cardstock with the same sheers will give the photo a defined space on your page.
  
  
• To add a different touch to your page you can get color copies made of your photos. Then crop the photos in a variety of sizes and styles. It does not have to be perfectly cropped; you can do this free hand with ordinary scissors.
  
  
• If you have a photo and want to display several elements you can make copies of the photo and crop them different ways. This technique is good to use if there are several persons in the photo or to capture a landmark in the background.
  
  
• To make a silhouette, crop close to your subject in your photo. Adding black or another dark color of cardstock will help with this design. You can use the dark color cardstock to accentuate a black and white photo.
  
  
• There are exceptions for cropping shapes, such as, a Valentine’s Day page. You can use a heart shaped cookie cutter as a template and place your photo on heart shaped cardstock. Other cookie cutters you could use are a Christmas tree, jack o lantern, and a flag. These are less expensive than purchasing die cuts for each holiday event you are displaying.
  
  
• For the most precise photo cropping you could use templates. These come in a variety of shapes and sizes.  Although templates are the durable and safe way to crop they can be quite expensive. If you insist on purchasing templates only get two basic shapes. I would recommend an oval shape and a square or rectangle shape. Avoid purchasing any other shape, no matter how cute you may think it is now. There are not too many photos you can use heart shaped templates on.
  
  
• For bold and beautiful colored backgrounds, less cropping means more eye catching colors to use for cardstock. Save that breath taking photo of blooming flowers and work it into your page.
  
  
• Use photo corners to display heritage photos. Putting adhesives on the back of these photos can damage them permanently. Use caution when working with these photos. Remember, the older the photo is the more fragile they have become.
  
  
• Unfortunately you can not crop Polaroid’s, they contain a chemical that could leak onto your other photos and destroy them. You can display them in other ways, such as, attaching a pocket sleeve to the page and placing the photo in the sleeve. Placing photo corners on the four edges is another way to display them without endangering your other photos.
  
  
• Remember, you should always have copies made in case you make a mistake and need to replace a photo.

Not all photos have to be cropped, they may look just fine the way they are. Simple cropping designs work the best and provide you with a clean line design.

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