87. Create a New Image from a Selection Before You Begin  70 About Making Selections
86 About Copying, Cutting, and Pasting Data Within a Selection
See Also  88 Create a New Layer from a Selection
90 Copy Data into a Selected Area
You can create new images within the Editor by using selections from other images. For example, you might want to create a new image that contains only a portion of the original image, such as the head and shoulders of a person taken from a full-length photo of that person. When you have copied the selection to the new image, you can make modifications to the new image without affecting the original image. When you create a new image by copying a portion of another image, you use the Clipboard. First select only the portion of the image you want to use and copy that selection to the Clipboard. When you issue the File, New, Image from Clipboard command, the Editor creates the new image using the contents of the Clipboard. 1. | Copy the Selection
NOTE  | When you're copying data from one image to another, you're using the Elements clipboard. If you have enabled the Export to Clipboard option in the Preferences dialog box, data on this clipboard is also copied to the Windows Clipboard for use in other programsthe purpose of that option is to help you get data out of Elements; thus, that option does not have to be on for this task to work, even if you want to create a new image from data copied from another program (the option has nothing to do with data coming into Elements). |
Open the image you want to copy data from in the Editor in Standard Edit mode. From the Layers palette, choose the layer whose contents you want to copyin whole or partinto a new image. Make your selection using the tool of your choice.
From the menu bar, select Edit, Copy to copy the selection to the Clipboard. To copy all visible pixels within the selection, regardless of what layer they are on, choose Edit, Copy Merged instead. See 86 About Copying, Cutting, and Pasting Data Within a Selection for help.
| 2. | Create the New Image
Select File, New, Image from Clipboard to create a new image from the contents of the clipboard. The new image is sized to match the actual size of the data within the clipboard. In other words, if the selection was 400 x 400 pixels in size, that will be the size of the new image.
 NOTE | You can create a new image from anything you have copied to the Windows Clipboard, even data that was copied from another Windows application. |
When you create a new image file, the existing image file from which you copied the selection remains open. (You can see the open files in the Photo Bin at the bottom of the screen.) The Editor indicates the selected image file by outlining it in blue.
| 3. | View the Result
NOTE | To create an image using data you capture from your computer screen, arrange the monitor display to show the programs or elements you want to capture and press the Print Screen key. Return to the Editor and select File, New, Image from Clipboard to create a file containing whatever data was displayed on your computer monitor. |
Save the new image in Photoshop (*.psd) format. Make any changes you want and save the PSD file again. Resave the final result in JPEG or TIFF format, leaving your PSD image with its layers (if any) intact so that you can return at a later time and make different adjustments if you want.
In this example, I created a new image using a roasted turkey copied from the original photo.
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