To Use Rectangular Marquee Tool — Help Needed

What is the actual pixel dimensions of your photo? What is the PPI of your photo?

—
Have A Nice Day, 🙂
James Hutchinson
http://www.pbase.com/myeyesview
http://www.myeyesviewstudio.com/

I agree with James. It sounds as if the image you’re trying to "capture" isn’t big enough. Post the specs he asked for, and then we’ll see what might be causing the problem. Hint: In order to select an 8 X 10 area, the image you’re starting with has to be bigger than that as measured in specs listed in Image>Resize>Image Size. There have been a few people in the past who have confused what they see on the monitor with the actual size of their image.

Hi, James and Beth —

Thanks for your responses.

The pixel dimensions for my photo are Width of 1560, Height of 1040. Under Document Size it lists Width of 1.3" and Height of .867". The resolution is 1200 ppi.

For what it’s worth, I have printed this photo at 10 x 8 inches using Microsoft PictureIt with excellent results. So I am puzzled if it turns out that it is not printable with PSE at the same size. I purchased PS Elements because I thought it would be a much better program for me to use. And I am anxious to start using my new Epson 2200. So far, I have only printed about four 8 x 10s previously processed with MS PictureIt, just to see that it did work OK, which thankfully it did.

Please tell me what you suggest should be my next step.

Thanks again —
Kay

To get a 10 x8 out of that without resampling you would have to change the PPI to 130 which most would not consider acceptable. The math is the same regardless of the program you use.
The reason the marquee tool selected the entire photo was that at 1200 ppi your image is 1.3 inches by .867 inches.

—
Have A Nice Day, 🙂
James Hutchinson
http://www.pbase.com/myeyesview
http://www.myeyesviewstudio.com/
wrote in message

Hi, James and Beth —

Thanks for your responses.

The pixel dimensions for my photo are Width of 1560, Height of 1040.

Under Document Size it lists Width of 1.3" and Height of .867". The resolution is 1200 ppi.

For what it’s worth, I have printed this photo at 10 x 8 inches using

Microsoft PictureIt with excellent results. So I am puzzled if it turns out that it is not printable with PSE at the same size. I purchased PS Elements because I thought it would be a much better program for me to use. And I am anxious to start using my new Epson 2200. So far, I have only printed about four 8 x 10s previously processed with MS PictureIt, just to see that it did work OK, which thankfully it did.

Please tell me what you suggest should be my next step.

Thanks again —
Kay

If you want to try this technique, you might get an acceptable 8 X 10. It will involve upward resampling, though, so be sure you work on a copy of your original image. You don’t want to experiment on your only image file!

Go to Image>Resize>Image Size. First, make sure there is NO checkmark in the box marked Resample. Now reduce just the resolution of the image down to 130ppi. This should give you new dimensions of 8 X 12 inches. Click OK and return to the desktop. NOW do your crop to 8 X 10. After you’ve resized to 8 X 10, go back to Image>Resize. This time put a checkmark in the Resample box and begin to resize upwards using just the image resolution, going in 10% increments. In other words, first increase the resolution to 143ppi, then go to 157ppi. Keep going until you get it up around 200ppi. That’s probably pushing it far enough. At least it gets you within the target printing resolution for inkjet printers.

OK, so Nancy is going to come along and tell you how to do this by adjusting the percentage in Image>Resize, and I’ll welcome her! I just tried it, and I guess I was going too fast because I couldn’t get it to work. It does, though, if you do it right. 🙂

I stopped while I was resizing my test page and noticed that 260ppi will give you a perfect 4 X 6, in case you’re interested.

What is the source of these images? It almost looks like a scan of a slide. If it is, you might want to check the optical resolution of your scanner and see if you can scan at a higher resolution. That’ll give you more pixels to work with for these larger prints.

The other software you were using was having to resample in order to get that 8 X 10 you want. The difference is that using Elements lets you control it a bit more.

Kay,

As I read and pictured your question, it seemed to me that the Select All was in direct contradiction to your wanting a fixed size. (be sure if you’re using pixels or inches)

As I recall, after choosing the fixed size, you place the cursor anywhere on the picture, hold down with left mouse button and pull – it should open only to the size you have chosen. with Marching Ants.

Then to move it to the area you want to show in the picture, go to the center of the box, click and hold, and you should be able to pull the entire thing to where you want it. When you’ve got it placed where you want, you can choose to cut or copy or inverse or whatever Beth told you.

Hope this helps,

Lorace

Kay,

The selection box (marching ants) you requested had dimensions of 8×10 but your image in its present state was only a couple of inches. It could not select 10 inches because there weren’t 10 inches there…here is the key to the matter… AT THAT RESOLUTION. It is a simple matter to change your image to something around 8×10 and use the marquee tool set to Fixed 8×10 to end up with a perfect 8×10. Your other program was doing this invisibly behind your back, not requiring any user input. PSE is a much more capable and robust program, it gives the user a lot of control over the processes involved in editing, resizing and printing. With more control comes power. You just need to realize there is a learning curve but I guarantee that knowing how to use the program is worth the journey.

I basic tenant to using the program effectively is understanding pixels, resolution and printed resolution. I wrote the following for someone else’s specific situation, but I think it will be helpful to you.

"Files from digital cameras are all 72ppi. The ppi number is only relative to printing and has no bearing on screen viewing as monitors don’t relate to ppi. An image is really only a grid comprised of "x" pixels by "y" pixels. The higher the megapixel the camera, the more pixels in the image. One particular camera produces files of certain dimensions, in your case 1600×1200. This is an absolute (at the quality you have the camera set for). What is variable, is the degree of compactness of these finite pixels. The level of compression can merely be assigned in an arbitrary manner. The more tightly packed together these pixels are, the less physical space they occupy when printing.

A file at 72 ppi has rather large pixels and won’t produce a nice print as they will be noticable and the photo will not be sharp nor pleasing. I can assign a more appropriate ppi to said file if I want to get a decent print. With the pixels smaller, the detail in the image is much better and the tones seem continuous, rather than looking like little boxes as they would at 72ppi. The number of pixels remains the same, I only change their spacing, I crowd them together, I change the resolution. Between 180-300ppi is a good resolution for a file you wish to print. However, the higher the resolution, the smaller the printed size will be (they are crowded and take up less space). Resolution and printed size are inversely proportional.

So…your camera produces files at 72ppi, Elements presents them to you at 180ppi. Probably because you can print at this resolution (albeit the lower end of generally accepted printing res.). It has the same number of pixels the camera produced. If you take your pics in jpg format and open using Explorer, they will have a res. of 72ppi. It really doesn’t matter. I can change the res. of an image all day long and not harm the picture (as long as Resample is not used). Your printer is changing the res. of the images to 300ppi for good quality printing, undoubtedly from the incamera res. of 72 to 300. When opened in Elements at 180ppi, you could change that to a higher number for better quality in printing, such as 300. Sometimes images look fine when printed having a res. of 180ppi. Sometimes it is a trade off, you go with the 180 res. because you want the printout to be larger than you would get with 300ppi.

There is no point in assigning a res. over 300ppi. No advantage, no gain. At 300ppi, you will get the maximum quality you can get."

Your situation is wanting to print a 8×10 from a scan of a slide. A slide is very little physically and would be of little value if printed out at equal size. Scanning at a resolution of 300 ppi is quite standard. That is IF you desire to print it out at the same size as the original. If the goal is to have the print be significantly larger than the scanned item, increasing the scanning resolution will get you there. Your slide was scanned at 1200ppi, perhaps the maximum resolution of the scanner, fine (need to scan high on something tiny). The pixels are teeny, weeny and jammed in that small space. Just let them expand and occupy more physical space and the result will be a larger print (using Image Resize).

What Beth was referring to when needing to add a few more pixels to get to a good print resolution was the method of increasing the existing pixels in increments of 10%. This seems to create a better product than doing a one time big increase. In Image Resize, for the Width, use the drop down arrow for units and select percentage. Put your cursor directly after the now appearing 100, backspace twice to remove the two zeros and type in a "1" and then a "0" (=110%). Make sure the Resample box is checked, we are asking the program to fabricate more pixels. Repeat this 10% increase until desired size is reached. Of course, there is a limit to how far one would want to go with this. I doubt I could get anything decent if trying to increase the size by 500%! Your last edit on your image will be applying the Unsharp Mask to sharpen the image as it will be a little softer than before. But, IMHO, all digital images need some sharpening. Your other program was doing this behind the scenes too.

Come back if you have a question on this. Stick with it!!! it’ll all make sense soon. A great expanation of this is at Wayne’s site, do read.

<http://scantips.com>

Nancy

Nancy, Lorace, Beth, and James —

You people are incredible; so willing to help a newcomer to your site;you give me hope that I will learn this software in due time.

You have asked pertinent questions, and I will try to answer them as well as fill you in on a little of my background in this endeavor.

First of all, all of my photography (which spans the last 60-or-so years of my life) has been taken with 35 mm film cameras. Many were taken with my trusty old Canon AE-1; some were taken with an Argus C-3, which probably most of you don’t remember. Others were taken with Pentax cameras, probably of the point-and-shoot variety, but at the top end of their lines. While most are color prints, a goodly amount are transparencies. Back in the 50s and 60s, when I worked as a newspaper reporter, I even learned to use a Crown Graphic, the cheaper cousin of the Speed Graphic.

About three years ago, I began wondering what would happen to my thousands of prints, negative, and transparencies. I decided to try my hand at scanning and digitally editing the best of my work, printing them, matting them, and even framing some of them, venturing into the art photography world. (I have had limited success in placing them in several area bookstores, frame shops and galleries, etc.)

Last summer I was invited to join a group of four other photographers in my area as we set up at several art and craft shows. For this coming spring and summer, our sponsor is wanting to feature my work alone in several art shows. (We learned that combining with craft shows is not a good venue.)

So that is why I recently purchased an Epson 2200 printer to archivally print my photos and the PS Elements 2 with which to edit them, better than the Microsoft PictureIt software. I settled on only learning how to edit them with PSE2 using the Quick Fix way to begin with, realizing that using layers, etc., has a very high learning curve and can wait for later.

From having studied your current forum entries as well as the archived ones, I realize that the pixels, resolution, resizing, resampling, etc., is a tough concept to understand, so I am being patient with it.
However, like it or not, I guess that is the next thing on my agenda to learn. Back to Jay Arraich’s articles on this subject.

Lorace, thanks for your observation about what I was doing with the "Select All" vs. the fixed size. I will play with that again tomorrow morning when my head is clearer, hopefully.

Thank you, Beth and Nancy, for explaining that the MS PictureIt was doing this resampling without my knowing this is what was happening which permitted me to get very acceptable 8 x 10 prints. And I certainly do agree, Nancy, that the PSE will be a "much more capable and robust program." BTW, the image that I was trying to print was a color print, not a transparency.

Thank you all for being willing to be my mentors on this journey. I am persistent; I will not give up.

Kay

(oops – wrong button!)

Kay, what a great story! I’m betting you’ll become an expert in Elements and a real asset to this forum….

Hi, Chuck —

Thanks for your words of encouragement. I’ve spent most of today’s "free" time reading and studying about resolutions, pixels, resizing, resampling, etc. Now the next step is to put that info into appropriate results.

Kay

Kay, you’ve picked a very important topic area about which to gain an understanding. Once you starting thinking in pixels, a lot of the confusion dies down…
🙂
Chuck