Tilting/rotating a photo

The original square? what do you mean by that?
1) That the first, non-rotated picture is there, in the background? or
2) That the background is a solid color (usually it may be white, but some rotating programs (like IrfanView) allow you to make that background any one color you want. or
3) That you expect that the angular sides to be the end of any image area?

If the answer is #3, then that is sort of harder (not impossible) to do, since images on computers typically have straight horizontal and vertical edges. One easy way of getting what you want, if that is #3, is to make the unwanted, "islanded," triangular corners an invisible color. You can make a color invisible with tools that save in either the GIF or PNG format.

Chuck,
Thank you for your reply, by original square I mean a white area where the photo was before I rotated it, I know you can change the colour of this, but I want to remove it altogether so I just have the photo only to use. Thanks, Del.

Just Googled for "saving non-rectangular images"

having to cut off the unwanted edges with scissors?

Don't forget, you are printing to plain paper which is rectangular in shape. Think of it like this. Perhaps you want a CD cover image that is circular. Unless you can find a process, (software that can produce a circular image, and a printer that will print to a circular piece of paper), you are going to be left with a circular image on a rectangular piece of paper, and you will have to use scissors to remove the unwanted paper.

You can find software that will print the CD Jewel Case, but those jewel cases will be based on a square, (or perhaps rectangular), sheet of paper.

If you accept that, then what about a workaround?

Get your image rotated the way you want it with whatever software you feel gives you the best image. Save that image to the hard disk, then open it in Paint, (MSPaint), and remove the background rectangular border with paint's eraser tool. It's primitive, but it may work for you, and that is how I do mine.

Have you tried a professional CD Jewel Case and Label creator application? One I found quickly on Google is;
http://www.createcdlabels.com/
but I haven't tried it.

Mark

It all depends upon where the image is used. If he is going to print it, then yes, it will be on a rectangular paper, and he might have to trim those edges with scissors.

But my guess is he wants to apply this image onto a webpage, and the corners are obliterating, or covering, something he wants to show through where those white corners are.

That is why I suggested that he use either the GIF image type (limited to 256 colors) or the PNG image type. That way he defines those unwanted corners to an "invisible color" and will then not appear on his webpage.

Yes I hadn't thought about posting them to a web site. Transparency problems are always a difficulty there with the normal jpeg or bitmap, but I didn't know PNG had the option to make certain areas transparent.

I learn something new everyday here, and I have said 'that' many times before,

Mark

Mark, why are you using admittedly the primitive to white out the unused corners. IrfanView can rotate any image you want, and make those corners any color you want, in one action.

I like using MS Paint, at times, but this is not one of those times.

is required for web sites, but it's readily available on all Windows OSs, and the idea was to give a workaround. It wouldn't have mattered what image editing software was used.

Mark

First, I confess that I am very much amateur, but I have played with this problem. Sometimes I get a pic which the camera was tilted and I want it to print "straight" My best program is Microsoft Picture It. First you need a blank page to use as a tool. I made my own. I took an ordinary photo (jpg) and using the coloring tool, made it perfect white, then saved it to my Documents. I keep one of those all the time. Then, I re-open Picture It, Browse to the image I want to rotate, get it on the "tray", then get my "blank" tool. I open the blank, then add the image. I can now rotate that image how I want. The next thing is to crop it, but I have never got "Picture it" to crop from this page. I then save as jpg what I have made, Close "Picture It", then just re-open, browse to your new piece, open it, THEN it will crop!! Sounds complicated, but works for me.
About those white corners, I get them if I save a cutout as jpg, but I save as tiff and the corners are "transparent" I hope I gave you an idea you can use.

You really ought to look into using IrfanView, which has a very easy to use Plug-in (Plug-ins expand the basic capabilities). The one plug-in I am talking about is IrfanPaint, which comes up by just pressing the <F12> key.

With the IrfanPaint sidebar open, you just click on the "Straighten tool" then draw any line that looks like the horizon you want. It will rotate the image to the amount that you think is true horizontal.

Once that is done you just crop (shut off the IrfanPaint sidebar first) by doing a simple click and drag, then press Ctrl-Y, and then save.

Yeah, I know it sounds complicated. I will look into that. 5 or 6 years ago I tried IrfanView and at that time, I was pretty green about computer and I didn't like it. I now forget why I didn't like, but I just never tried it again.

I would like to thank everyone who took the time to reply to my problem, regretfully I must admit defeat as I cannot remove the background at all, nor make it transparent which maybe would have helped the situation. Best wishes, Derek.

Just have someone do it for you, then perhaps you'd also learn how to do it.

But if you were not able to make a background invisible, perhaps:
* You are not using a graphics tool that has that ability; or
* You are trying to do it on an image that is not one of the formats that have that feature (GIF or PNG); or
* The background is not a single color, since only a single color can be made invisible; or
* You may have actually done it, but were not able to notice it really was an 'invisible' color if you do not have the image in a viewer that actually permits that ability; or
* You actually have done it, but without another background (other than white) you may not actually notice the effect; or
* You have actually done it, but you are expecting something to be invisible to you. In fact it isn't. It will be a color (almost any color) that you see, but with the correct viewer that is where the effect happens.

None of the above actually helps a lot, but perhaps it explains something you may not have noticed. Perhaps now you will not give up so easily, and try again.