Cropping An Image That's Off The Canvas
By Neil Blevins
Created On: Sept 25th 2005
Updated On: Mar 19th 2007

Go here to read this tutorial in Russian.

This happens to me a lot. Say you have an image that's 300x300 pixels...

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And you want to add a new layer of dirt to it, and your image is 500x500 pixels...

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So a pretty standard thing to do is to drag the dirt layer onto your original image, and set the dirt layer to multiply...

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But now lets say you decide to make this tileable. So you select your dirt layer and use the offset filter to offset the image 150x150 pixels (half the size of your 300x300 pixel image). Here's the result...

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Where's the seam? Well, the reason you can't see the seam is because even though the canvas is 300x300 pixels, your dirt layer is actually a 500x500 pixel image. You're only seeing 300x300 pixels of it. So the offset filter doesn't work the way you want it to. To make the dirt layer tileable, you need to crop the layer such that it's now only 300x300 pixels. The way to do that is to do Select All on the image and then hit crop. This now cuts out everything that's not on the canvas. Now when you do your offset you'll see the results you expect, and then can use the clone brush to remove the seam.

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