Photoshop Elements will allow you to crop in any shape you like; you’re pretty much limited only by your imagination. As far as cropping goes, PE 2 is extremely versatile. For example, you could take a picture of a flower and use it as the shape of your crop.
True cropping is only rectangular in Photoshop Elements. You can ‘cut a hole’ of any shape in the rectangle to view a picture below, but the resultant picture is always a rectangle.
The image itself is cropped into a rectangle – and that is true of all the photoediting programs that I know. What you can do is use transparency (if you are saving to a format such as tif of gif which supports it ) or match the background colour (using formats such as jpeg) so that the image prints out or displays on the web so that it looks as if it has been cropped into a fancy shape.
Susan S
Edit – you beat me Chuck!
Thanks for your feedback – are you all agreeing? or is Mark saying something different?
Kim, everyone is right. Buy the program and you know where to find us if you need help.
Kim
There is not a piece of software that will allow you to crop anyway other than a rectangle. This has to do with how images are being stored. Elements and many pieces of software will allow you to create all sorts of "crop" shapes but in the end they will all end up as rectangles. So while a cropped photograph might be in an oval shape the finished file will be a rectangle. If the background you are displaying it on is not the same colour as the border of your image it will show up as an oval inside a rectangle.
Grant