From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Using the Crop tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Using the Crop tool

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- [Instructor] While it's certainly possible to crop your images using Camera Raw, there may be instances when you need to crop or straighten an image later in your workflow once you know the size or aspect ratio that you need for a design or layout. Let's take a moment and open up the Coastline.jpg by double-clicking on it into Photoshop. Now, we can select the Crop tool from the toolbar or simply tap the C key. Photoshop places a Crop marquee around the entire image, but when you first select the Crop tool, instead of starting by adjusting the crop handles, you can simply click and drag inside of the image area in order to create your own crop. You can then use any of the handles to resize. If you hold down the Option key on Mac or the Alt key on Windows, you can resize from the center and you can reposition the crop by moving the image with the Crop marquee. If you need to crop to a specific aspect ratio, you can choose one of the aspect ratios from the list or you can enter in your own aspect ratio. In order to flip the aspect ratio, we can click on the double-headed arrows or just tap on the X key. If I want to remove the aspect ratio, I can click Clear. Now, currently, we can see the rule of thirds overlay on our image, but we can change that by selecting this grid. And if we prefer to see a Grid, Diagonal, Triangle, Golden Ratio or Golden Spiral, we can choose from any of these, and we can also tap the O key to cycle through them. Now, by default, this overlay is always going to show, but I prefer that it only shows when I have my mouse down, so I'm going to toggle on the Auto Show Overlay. Now, we don't see the overlay until I'm actually clicking and dragging to change the crop. There are additional options underneath the Gear icon. For example, I can choose not to show the cropped area so that we don't see anything outside of the crop. I'll enable that for now, and instead, maybe just increase the opacity of the Crop Shield up to 85% so that it darkens down this area a bit more. All right, I'll tap Enter in order to dismiss that. By default, the Delete Cropped Pixels is enabled. And if we look at our Layers panel, we'll see we were working with a background layer, but as soon as I use the Crop tool, we get this crop preview. And if I apply this crop by clicking on the check mark, those pixels outside of the canvas area have now been deleted. In fact, if I select the Move tool and we convert the background into a layer, and I reposition this, you can see that there is transparency all the way around the canvas because those pixels were deleted. So if we want to crop in a more flexible way, I'll choose File and then Revert in order to revert this, Command + 0 to fit on-screen, and then when I select the Crop tool, I'm going to uncheck the Delete Cropped Pixels option. Now, even though we're on the background, when I drag out my crop in my image area, we don't see the background anymore because Photoshop is going to automatically convert this background into a layer, because we've told it to save those pixels. So now when I apply the crop and we select the Move tool, I can still reposition the image because it saved all of the information beyond the canvas size. Now, because I'm working with a layered file and because Photoshop is holding onto that additional information, your file size will be larger than if you'd chosen to delete the crop pixels, but you have more flexibility. Also, if you save this as a Photoshop or a TIFF file, Photoshop will hang onto those pixels that are outside of the crop. If, however, you save as a JPEG or any other format that doesn't support layers, then you're going to lose those pixels outside of the canvas area. If I ever wanted to show the information outside of the canvas area, I could choose the Image menu, and then Reveal All, and Photoshop will build the canvas or increase the canvas size to include all of that original image. I'll use Command + 0 on Mac to zoom out to fit on-screen. All right, let's drag out another crop. And let's say that we've applied this crop. I don't have to use the check mark to do that. I can also tap Enter or Return or just select another tool or another layer. If I want to crop directly after having just cropped the image, you'll notice that we don't see the Crop marquee, but as soon as I click in the image area, then I would see that Crop marquee. So now I can go ahead and modify this, and if I ever wanted to reset the crop, I can click the first icon, to cancel the crop is the second, but for now, I'll go ahead and apply that. So there you have it, the crop tool makes it easier than ever to remove unwanted areas of the image while still preserving cropped information for flexible image editing.

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