From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Crop and change image size in one step - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Crop and change image size in one step

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- [Instructor] One of the assumptions that's made when we use the image size command to resize a document is that you want to use the entire image and that the image is already at the correct aspect ratio. But what if I only want to use a portion of the image and I want to change the aspect ratio, and I want to define the width, height, and resolution of the document in one step? Well, let's start by looking at image size. I'll choose Image and then Image Size. And let's say I want to print this image as a 4 x 5 inch image. Well, if I enter in 5 for the width, I'm not going to get 4 inches for the height. And if I type in 4 for the height, then I get almost 6 inches for the width. So, that tells me that this original image was at a 2 x 3 aspect ratio. And I want to print it at a different aspect ratio at 4 x 5, and so it's not going to work to do this using the image size. Well, I suppose I could unlink these and then I could type in 5, but that would squish and distort my image. So, I don't want to do that, I'll go ahead and relink that and then hit Cancel. Instead, I'll tap c in order to select the Crop tool. And here I can select, for example, a 4 x 5 aspect ratio. I want to swap that, so I will click on the double-headed arrows, and I can go ahead and not only reposition the image, but if I didn't want to use the entire image, I could also resize the crop marquee. Then, I could crop this, but then only cropped the file and it's not at the right size so I would have to do a second step, which would be to return to Image Size, and then enter in 5 for the width and get 4 for the height, and then click OK. So, in order to do this all in one step, well, let's revert the file. And then, with the Crop tool still selected, instead of using the ratio, I'm going to move up to width, height, and resolution. Now, I can type in exactly the dimensions and the aspect ratio that I want Photoshop to crop to, and it'll do it all in one step. So, here, I'll type in 5 in for inches, and then 4 in, and 300 for pixels per inch. Again, I don't have to use the entire document, I can go ahead and crop in and reposition it. And when I click on the check mark, we can see that not only has Photoshop cropped that to the correct aspect ratio, it's also only using a portion of the image, the portion that I wanted, and it's changed the size of the image to 4 x 5 at 300 pixels per inch. And I know that because I'm looking at the status bar, which says it's 1,500 x 1,200 pixels, which would be 4 x 5 at 300 pixels per inch. All right, now what if I want to crop this image to post online? Let's choose File and Revert again. I'll use the Crop tool again, but this time I'm going to set the width and height to pixels. So, I will change this to 1,600 px and then tap the Tab key, and then 700 px. And then, we don't actually need to enter in a resolution, so I could just delete that because when I post this online, the software is going to map each pixel in the original document to the pixels of the screen on the device that it's being displayed on. Now, we can redefine the area that we want to include in our image and then apply that crop, and it's been cropped and resized in one step. Now, if I thought I was going to use these options over and over again, I could use the dropdown menu and save this as a new crop preset. And then, the next time I need it, I can quickly access it from the list. All right, for now, let's clear those values. And there's one additional way that I want to show you how we can crop to a specific size, and that is by using the Marquee tool, so I'll select that, and then I'm going to revert this image. And let's say I only want an 800 x 800 pixel area of the image. So, I don't want the whole image, I need to pick a specific 800 x 800 pixel area. Well, I can change the style to fixed size, enter in 800 x 800, and then just click in the image area. Now, no matter where I reposition this, it's selecting 800 x 800 pixels. And when I choose the Image menu and select Crop, it will crop to just that area without resizing or resampling the image, but instead just cropping out all of the area that's outside of those 800 x 800 pixels. Now, before I forget, I'm going to change the style back to normal. And there we go, several methods to quickly crop to the perfect size in Photoshop.

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