Convert a Photo to a Square (Without Losing Parts of the Image)

I've been going back into the archives making sure I didn't miss any projects when I did my big organization and indexing of all my animal crafts. Sure enough, I found another reptile craft, which I'm very happy about since that category is sorely lacking. I'd forgotten about Trevor's Snake Cake from his early days as a Cub Scout. In order to include it on the indexed page, I needed to convert the existing photo from a rectangle...

.... to a square. 

It wouldn't have been that big of a deal to just crop it square in this case, but there are many projects where doing so would cut off part of the image in an unflattering or confusing way. So I take a few extra steps to preserve the original image while converting to square. Using PicMonkey, I open Design and make a custom canvas size (usually 1000x1000). Then I choose Add Your Own Graphics and put the original photo on top of the plain canvas. I save this file. 

Then I reopen the file in Edit. Next, I make color corrections. The original Snake Cake image is a bit dark, so I adjusted the exposure in the Basic Edits, then used Highlights in the Touch Up menu to lighten the tabletop and the marshmallow eyes a little.

The final step is to use the Clone tool from the Touch Up menu to fill in the white areas to match the tabletop and wall in the original photo.  

I've done this so many times that it takes me just a few minutes to go through the steps to create a square image from a rectangular one. (It's not perfect, but it doesn't need to be since it will be displayed at such a small resolution compared to what you see here.) With new projects, I create the square image from the get-go to save having to go through the steps to create it later.

By the way, not only is this Snake Cake now up on the Reptiles and Amphibians page, but I've added it to my current huge project, which is indexing my edible crafts. I'm almost done, so I'll be sharing that soon! I'm really excited to have all of the edible crafts in one place, and pleased with myself for working hard on another of my 2019 creative resolutions.