I find Paint to be too restrictive and crippled to work with photographs.

For starters you need to get a more powerful program, that is designed for photographs.

There is an excellent free program called Irfanview.
It lets you do all of the necessary actions for working with photographs.

http://www.irfanview.com

Download the free program and install it on your computer. I keep a copy of Irfanview on all of my computers. It is a very desirable image viewing program because it is so fast.

Once you have Irfanview installed.
Open a photograph and then use your cursor to draw a rectangle on the photograph, to outline the area that you want to keep. Then click "Edit" and "Crop Section". The program discards everything outside the rectangle.

After you crop a photo and want to save the crop section always click "File" and "Save As". That lets you give it a different name to keep from overwriting the original photo file.

Irfanview may be all that you ever need for photo manipulations.

There are more powerful photo software programs around, that will let you do more precise crops plus fixed size and fixed aspect ratio. When you get ready for one of those, check out Adobe Photoshop Elements. It costs about $80.

For now ---- download, install and use Irfanview.
You will keep it around even if you later go to a more powerful program.

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