In our cropping example , a photo from the Toronto Santa Parade is used. This turns out to be a challenging cropping assignment because there are many potential centers of interest.

There are the flags, the marching line, the smiling senior scout at the lower left - and the shivering, not quite prepared flag bearer just to the right of our senior scout. So lots of areas to catch our attention.

The two most distracting elements are the snow flakes and the parade watchers bundled in sleeping bags at the upper right - interesting, but too small to work with.

So our first cut at a crop is to catch the advancing line of marchers. This cuts off the flags whose tops form an arc. It also has some marchers legs cut off and others completely showing.

Finally, the crop of the picture looks slighty out of whack with so many lines leading into and out of the image at different angles but short lengths- it is all distracting. But we do get the subjects of interest our smiling senior scout, the shivering flagbearer and two girl guides in the front ranks who seem to have a better notion of "Be prepared" than their brethren scouts.

So our next crop concentrates on the flags. They bring color to the image and have a natural arch to them . So in this crop, the flags and their tips set the upper limits while the marchers hips are the lower cutoff line (so we don't have some marchers with legs cut-off and some not.).

However, now there is a loss here- our senior scout in the lower left along with one of the better prepared girl guides. Stretching out to catch her also brought in too much of the background building. Ditto for moving the crop on the right to catch all the flags. Finally it became obvious that this was not an image about flags; but about people carrying flags.

So our third trial crop went back to getting all the key people in but reducing the fuzz . First we did not try to capture the peak of the tallest flag but instead went for the second and third tallest flags to set our top crop line.

On the left we used the senior scout's shoulder as the next crop point. On the right we used the tip of the furling Canadian flag to set the right crop line.

But the bottom line proved problematic. The shivering flag bearer's white gloved fist proved to be set point for the bottom crop.

So now we have a reasonable crop - but as you can see by the process and reasoning process - there is no one best way or perfect crop, Rather the cropping should lend emphasis to the story you are trying to get the image to tell or maybe just hint at.

Taking that a point further, in our finished image, the shivering flag bearer seems to be shaking the whole scene - ah what fun photo editing can be.

One of the benefits of the cropping tool in Adobe Photoshop Elements is that the area of the image to be cropped away is darkened - this allows an artist to see better the to-