Can anyone help me?!

[chad.palmer]

Hi there, really need some help... i want to take a section of a photo that i have taken and use it in another creation. I want to cut out some petels from some flower photos i recently took, and use the petels from a variety of photos in another picture. Every time i make a selection and then cut the selection out of the original photo and paste it in a new document it goes into giant mode and is ridiculously large.

Is there anyway to cut out a section of a photograph and make it smaller/resize it?!

Please ask me any questions if u dont understand, i may not be explaining myself clearly enough.

Any suggestions would be of great use.

Thanks.

[Tamlin]

Check the resolution of your source and target images. If they are different, you will get a mismatch in size when you drag a selection from one to the other.
A couple of workarounds:

1. Use Image > Image Size...to check and (if necessary) change the resolution of your images so that they match.
2. When you've dragged your "giant" image from the source to the target, resize the "giant" layer with Edit > Transform > Scale. You might need to zoom out a bit to see the handles if the dragged-in layer is really huge.

[wolly]

hi chad palmer hope this helps,once you have the petel image pasted in, press control t and it will bring up the transform box hold down shift in one of the corners and drag in this will reduce the size and keep its original proportions.

[chad.palmer]

Thanks for the tips/adivce guys. I will try again and see what works, will let you guys know how i get on. Thanks again. Chad

[chad.palmer]

Hi, its me again, tried out your comments and they work like a charm. Now i have another question, now that i know how to resize the petels, i was wondering if anyone had any great tips on how to cut them out of the original photos perfectly, e.g. with minimal background. Currently i am using the lasso tool to draw around my petels but its very irregular in the way that i end up with bits of the petel missing and bits of other background photo that i dont want in my cut out petel. I tried using the circle shape tool and then trying to cut them from there, as that way i get a perfect circle. I also thought about using the lasso and draw a large circle around the petel i want and then using the eraser tool to white out any background i dont want, but this is time consuming.

Any great ideas, please let me know.
Thanks.
CP

[Tamlin]

If what you're trying to remove from the background is complicated and fiddly, the best tool for the job would probably be the Extract filter. It's a bit too much to describe in detail here, but you can look it up in Photoshop Help, or try out an online tutorial: photoshop extract tutorials - Google Search

If the difference in tone/colour between your subject and the background is quite distinct, you might also get good results by using the Background Eraser tool. Again, its usage is explained in the Help file.