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Participant
May 11, 2022
Question

How to cut /trim a photo at any angle?

  • May 11, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 1378 views

I have three antique quilts and I want to composite into one view showing a 120 degree section of each quilt radiating from the center.  Can anyone suggeset a work flow?

1 reply

Chuck Uebele
Community Expert
Community Expert
May 12, 2022

In the above image. I loaded all 3 images into one file.

Then I made guides at the center of the document.

 

Then I used the shape tool to draw a triangle centered over the entire canvas - too big, so you can't see it.

 

Then I snapped guide lines to the boundry of the triangle. This gave me the points for the 120 deg. angles.

 

In the topmost layer I used the pen tool to draw a path, as you can see in the above screen shot. which I made a vector layer mask by having it selected the clicking on the mask icon in the layer's panel, while holding ctrl/cmd.

 

I then held alt/opt, and dragged that layer mask to the layer below to copy it.

 

I then edited the vector shape to create the next 120 deg mask, as you can see by the shape of the mask thumbnail.

 

By doing these two layer mask, I didn't need to create one for the last layer. The layer masks overlap themselves, so there should be no white edges.

 

 

jane-e
Community Expert
Community Expert
May 12, 2022

Great solution Chuck!

 

I would have created an image in Illustrator with the same pixel dimensions, then set the Construction Guides to 120° and drawn the paths. I would then copy and paste the perfect 120° angled paths back in PS and use them to select and mask.

 

Everytime I do this I wish PS had this ability!

 

Jane

 

Chuck Uebele
Community Expert
Community Expert
May 12, 2022

There are a lot of things I wish PS had, which IA does.