How To: The proper way to crop a tag

This tutorial was written by me on 12/21/2014 and assumes you have working knowledge of PSP. Any similarities to other tuts is purely coincidental and not done on purpose.

Cropping properly is a good thing. It means you don't accidently crop off any drop shadows, tubes, scrap elements or your mask.

Some people wait till they merge visible on their tag and then crop, but if you do that to your blank (you want a blank tag if you're going to make tags for more then one person) then if you make a goof in your tag like an error in the copyright for example, then you have to remake the tag all over again. Always leave your blanks with full layers intact so if you goof all you have to fix is that 1 layer.

So my cropping method is a 2 step process. Finding a layer that sits closest to the edge of the canvas on one side. Then cropping around that layer by leaving the node for that side where it sits and then dragging the other 3 nodes to the edge of the canvas.

First click on your raster deform tool. Now you're going to find which layer sits at the highest point on your canvas. For my example tag here, it's the tube.So activate that layer, you'll get the deform box around it. If by chance there's a drop shadow or element that extends beyond the top of the tube, well then you're going to want to activate that layer instead. Once you have the layer closest to the top of the canvas active then click on your crop too.

Now with your crop tool active, click on Snap Crop Rectangle to: layer opaque. The box will be only around the tube like this:

Now we're going to leave the top node where it sits. Click on the left node and drag it all the way to the edge of the canvas. The right node all the way to the right and the bottom node all the way to the bottom. Click apply to crop.

Now we're going to do the same with the left side. Use your raster deform tool if you need it to find the layer that sits closest to the left edge. For my tag here, it's the sparkle layer. Once you have the correct layer active, click on the crop tool again. Don't forget to snap the crop to layer opaque.

This time the left node will stay where it's at and you're going to drag the top, right and bottom nodes to the edge of the canvas. Click apply to crop.

Repeat these last 2 steps on the right and bottom most layers. When you're done your tag will be perfectly cropped.

And that's it, congrats, you're done!