Crop Photo with Free Paint.NET Software

Oscar Sodani is a founder of Help2Go and owner of Help2Go Networks, an IT consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area. Oscar holds the CISSP certification as well as industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Novell.

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to crop a photo image. Cropping a photo is a useful technique that helps you get rid of unwanted objects in your photograph, or helps you to re-center the frame.

We'll be using the free Paint.NET software to crop the photo. 

If you don't already have Paint.NET, read this article for instructions on downloading and installing Paint.NET.

Start up Paint.NET. Click on the File menu and choose Open. Then select the photo you would like to crop. In this tutorial, I will be using this photo:

The first thing we need to do is to select the portion of the photo that we would like to keep. We'll use the Rectangle Select tool. You can find it in the Tools toolbar - it's the first icon in the upper left:

Alternatively, you can just type the letter "S" on your keyboard, and the Rectangle Select tool will be chosen.

Now that we have the right tool, use your mouse to draw a box around the portion of the photo you would like to keep. Start at the upper-left hand corner, click and hold the mouse button, and drag it down to the lower-right corner. 

After you draw the rectangle, it should look something like this:

If the dotted rectangle isn't just the way you want it, no problem. Just click the Edit menu and choose Undo. Then try again.

Once the dotted rectangle is where you want it to be, we can go ahead and crop the photo. One way to do this is to click on the Image menu and choose Crop to Selection. Alternatively, you can choose the Crop tool on the main toolbar, which looks like this:

Your photo should now be cropped, like this:

Next, save the photo. Click on the File menu and choose Save As... Type in a new file name, click OK, and you are all set! 

More Paint.NET tutorials:

Resize a Photograph 

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