Crop into several pieces help pls.

How do I crop a photo into several pieces like a puzzle. It doesn't matter what shape the pieces are, so long as they will all fit together again. When I use the crop tool, it takes one piece and deletes the rest... Somebody told me to make a duplicate image and crop that way, but how will I know I'm cropping in the right place? Thanks.

are you trying to make a puzzle or were you just using that as an analogy? your final output will dictate how you go about it. as a beginning point, i would suggest using a combination of the lasso tools and the marquee tools to select the part you want to crop first. then you can go to Layer --> New Layer via Cut or something like that (don't remember of the top of my head). do that for each piece, the more pieces, the harder it's going to be, obviously, but totally doable.

hope this helps!

Thanks for replying. I want to break a photo into say 6 pieces, then email one piece at a time to my brother. It's going to be like a guessing game until he receives all 6 pieces.
Is that possible?

ok, basically what you want to do is cut up each of the 6 pieces, making sure they're on their own layer. the easiest way, again, is to use some form of selection tool (lasso, marquee, etc.) and then do a Layer-->New-->Layer via Cut. once you have all six pieces on their own layer, hide all layers except one, click on the "Create new document from current state" button at the bottom of your History palette. you can trim it down if you want or just leave it as is. then just save it.

repeat that process of each of the other layers. if you have any other questions, just let me know

have fun, and good luck!

Thank you so much for your help! I am going to try it out.

anytime! again, if you get stuck or have a question, feel free to post up with it.