Production Process: Image editing development

So far in the production of this music magazine coursework I have used 3 editing programmes to manipulate my images. They are: Picasa 3, Paint and http://www.picnik.com/. Although I used all of these software products efficiently and they did enable me to meet the needs of the requirement, in order to ensure a more professional presentation I decided it would be best to use Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 (Editor). The other programmes that I have used so far were ideal for changing the lighting and texture of the image but effective cropping was an issue. Therefore, I decided to experiment my cropping ability on Photoshop by cropping an image that would appear on my front cover.

This is the image that I first took of the guitars:

Then I roughly cropped out the background around the two guitars on paint.

After this I uploaded the image onto photoshop and did the following: