One of the most often asked questions of the webmaster is how to crop or resize your art pictures. This is one of a series of articles on preparing your images for uploading to your website.

There are dozens for image editing programs available for preparing your images to be published on the internet. Typically all of the programs accomplish the same task but they all work a bit differently in terms of what commands they use and their approach to carrying out the task.

As a result, MyArtClub has found a Windows based program which can be down loaded for free from the web. We have prepared a set of instructions for this program. If you don't already have the program, you can download it for free at:

http://www.irfanview.ca/main_download_engl.htm

This link shows a number of different sites where the program may be downloaded. If the link is out of date, try looking up "Irfanview download" in Google or another search engine.

Crop your images

One of the best ways to show your art on the web is to be able to crop your image so that the viewer is not distracted by the frame or other background that takes away from the art.

Open your image
First start the program IrFanView and open up a file. Click on "file", then "open" and then search for an image you want to crop. When you have located the image, click on the "open" button. The folliwing picture shows the menu when the "file" link is clicked to expose the "open" function and the image that loaded. The short cut key is also shown. You can get to the "open" function by clicking on the letter "o".

Crop your image
To crop, first put your mouse on one corner of the image (e.g. the top left corner) and hold the left mouse button down. Then while holding the left mouse button down, drag the mouse down to the opposite right bottom corner. You will see a rectangle has formed around the image. It may look like this when you let go of the mouse button:

You can work with the edges, by clicking on an edge of the rectangle; you can move each edge in or out of the image. In this way you can optimize each edge to get the most of the picture included.

MyArtClub recommends that you don't leave any of the background, as clean lines look best. As well don't try to show the frame. It is best to just focus on the image.

Once you have got about the most of the image defined, now you are ready to complete the crop operation. Click on the link "Edit" and then the "Crop Selection" as shown in the following picture. Or you can use the short cut keys by pressing the "Ctrl" key and the "Y" key at the same time.

Now your image is cropped by eliminating everything outside of the box. It now looks like this:

Save your image
Now you need to save the file. MyArtClub recommends that you don't save it with the same file name – as that would overwrite the original. So perhaps append the word "– cropped" to the end of the file name. Or even better, save the images in a separate folder of art, e.g. called "MyWebArt" making it easier to find the images when you are ready to load them up to your website.

In the next article we will show you how to overcome the next biggest challenge for loading your art on your website - resizing your art image so that the images are easy to load and view by your website visitors.