need advice - making custom crop shapes

[demonweb]

i did a search on this, but nothing came up.

i'm cropping thumbnail images for the mainpage of a website. what's frustrating me is i find most of the elements cookie cutter shapes to be laughable, if not completely dorky. this really disappointed me, because i thought elements would have a great selection of crop shapes for portraits and not all these silly arrows, symbols and trophies. all the spray-painted template borders look the same to me. the marquee tool only gives me a rectangle or oval option to crop with. and the crop tool only makes a rect.

so, i'm wondering if anyone can advise on how i can crop my images with empahsis on the image border. are these the only templates we have to use? are there more templates i can d/l from somewhere? i just want to be sure i'm not missing something somewhere. i want more interesting/useful image border crop shapes, i guess that's what i'm saying. any suggestions?

[Diana]

Hi,

Any custom shape for PSE or Photoshop that you download and install will be available in your list to be used as a Cookie Cutter crop shape. Here is a wonderful source for free custom shapes:

http://share.studio.adobe.com/axBrowseProduct.asp?p=2
You'll have to register to download, but it's free.

Here's a link to more free goodies and where and how to install them:
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pselements/qt/freegoodies.htm (http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pselements/qt/freegoodies.htm)


Diana

[demonweb]

thanks! i'll try some of those.

[Valerie]

Demon, don't know if this is what your looking for, but in the last picture I did (in gallery(cottage), I free handed the lasso around the images (top left), then cropped unrestricted, put a vignette around for soft effect and stroked around for frame. That way I got just the people I wanted, not all the clutter around it.