From the course: Photoshop 2023 Essential Training

Using the Crop tool in Photoshop - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2023 Essential Training

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Using the Crop tool in Photoshop

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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 the aspect ratio that you need for a design or a layout. Let's take a moment and look at the crop tools many options in Photoshop. I'll tap the C key to select the crop tool or we can select it from the toolbar. Now by default Photoshop places a crop marquee around the entire image. But when you first select the crop tool, instead of starting by adjusting the crop, you can simply drag in the image area in order to create your own crop. Then we can use any of the handles to create or refine the crop. And we can hold down the option key on Mac or the alt key on Windows if we want to drag out from the center of the crop. In order to reposition the crop, we can click inside the marquee and then just drag. We can also select a specific aspect ratio for the crop. I'll use the options bar and choose four by five and we can see that those values have been entered. I can still resize the crop and reposition the image. And if I ever want to swap the four by five to five by four I can click on this icon here or just tap the X key. If I want to remove the aspect ratio I can simply click clear. Photoshop also displays a number of overlays which we can control clicking on the overlay icon. We can select from any of these options or we can just tap the O key to cycle through the different overlays. So we'll tap through and you can see some of these overlays. All right, we're back at the rule of thirds. I actually prefer to change this so that instead of always showing the overlay, I use auto show overlay, so I won't see the overlay until I actually click and drag in order to change the crop marquee. There's some additional options that I want to point out underneath the gear icon, we can see that by default we are showing the cropped area, so that's the area outside of the crop marquee. But I can toggle this on or off or I can use the H key to toggle the visibility of it while I'm using the crop tool. We can also change the opacity of the crop shield so if you didn't want to see this area or you wanted to see it at a differing opacity, we can simply change that here. For now I'll go ahead and set it up to around 85 and then tap enter, or return in order to apply that. To the right of that is the option to delete crop pixels and this is on by default. So this means that if I apply this crop right now Photoshop is going to throw away all of the information outside of the the crop marquee. And because I started with a single layer document that was a background we can see in the layers panel that I still have that background but I also have this temporary state where I see this crop preview. If I use the check button in order to apply that crop, the crop preview disappears and I'm just left with the background. Now again, all of the information outside of this canvas area has been cropped. In fact, if I unlock the background and turn it into a regular layer and then select the move tool and I reposition this photograph, we can see that there's no extra information. It's actually been cropped off. If we want to crop in a more flexible way, well first let's revert this image. Then I'll tap the C key again to select the crop tool. But this time I'm going to uncheck the delete cropped pixels. Then I'll go ahead and drag out my crop marquee. And we can see in the layers panel we no longer have that background, so Photoshop is going to automatically convert the background into a layer so that it can hold on to all of this information that's outside of the crop marquee. This time when I apply the crop, and we select the move tool, we can see that in fact there is more information beyond the visible canvas area and I can reposition it as needed. We can also see in the layers panel that I no longer have a background, but instead it's been converted to layer zero. Now, because I'm working on this layered file and because Photoshop is holding onto that additional information, the file size will be larger than if I'd chosen to delete those cropped pixels. But if I save this as a Photoshop or a TIFF file Photoshop's going to hang onto those pixels that are outside of the crop. So if I ever need to rearrange or move the image within the canvas area, I'll have that additional information to use. If however, I save this as a JPEG or any other format that doesn't support layers, then I am going to lose those pixels that are outside of the canvas area. If I ever want to show the information that's outside of the canvas area, I can choose the image menu and then select reveal all, and Photoshop will automatically create a larger canvas in order to show me all of that additional information. All right, let's select the crop tool and drag out our crop and I'll go ahead and apply that. You don't have to use the check mark up here to apply it. You could select another tool for example or you can tap return or enter to apply it. Now, if I've just cropped something and I want to crop it again, you'll notice that with the crop tool selected, I don't see the crop handles. So if I ever want to bring those back, all I need to do do is just click in the image area and there is the crop marquee. If we ever want to reset the crop we can use this icon right here or we could use this icon in order to cancel out of the crop. For now, I'll go ahead and apply it, and 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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