From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

Using the Crop tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Using the Crop tool

“

- Well it's certainly possible to crop your images using Camera Raw, there may also 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 layout. I'm going to tap the C key to select the crop tool, but we can also select it from the toolbar. Now by default, Photoshop places a crop marquee around the entire image, but you can also just click and drag in the image area in order to create your own. We can use any of the handles in order to resize the crop marquee, and I can hold down the Option key on Mac or the "alt" key on Windows in order to resize from the center. I can reposition the crop marquee by clicking and dragging within the marquee. If I need to change the aspect ratio, I can select one from the list or enter in my own values. In order to swap the values, I can click the double-headed arrows. And to remove an aspect ratio, I can always click the Clear button. We can use the overlay icon in order to change the different overlays or we can cycle through them by just tapping the "o" key. As I cycle through the different overlays, if there's an overlay where I want to change the orientation, I can just add the Shift key and tap "o". If I only want the overlay to appear when I have the mouse down, then I can choose to auto show the overlay. Now, as I draw it, I can see the overlay, but when I release the cursor, the overlay is hidden. If I ever want to hide the area around the crop marquee, I can use the gear icon and disable the show cropped area, or we can toggle it by just tapping the "h" key. I'll tap it once to hide and then tap it again to reveal it. Now, by default, the option to delete cropped pixels is enabled. And when we opened this image, it was a single layer document with a background. So we can see in the layers panel that I still have that background as well as a preview for the crop. If I were to apply this crop by clicking on the check mark, or by tapping enter or return, Photoshop has deleted all of the pixels that are beyond the canvas area. In fact, if I tap the "v" key to select the move tool and we unlock the background, even when I reposition this, we can see that those extra pixels have been permanently deleted. I'm going to choose file and then revert. And this time, when I tap "c" to select the crop tool, I'm going to disable the delete cropped pixels. Now, when I click and drag out my crop marquee, we see in the layers panel that there's no longer a background. And if I were to apply this crop and then switch to the move tool by tapping the "v" key, we can see that Photoshop has actually held on to all of the pixels that are beyond the canvas area. Now, because we are working with a layered file and because Photoshop is holding onto that extra information, our file size will be larger than if we'd chosen to delete those cropped pixels. And as long as we save these files as either PSD or TIF files, then Photoshop will hang onto those pixels that are outside of the crop. If however, you save as a JPEG or any other file format that doesn't support layers, then you're going to lose those pixels that are beyond the canvas area. If you ever want to show the information outside of the canvas, we can always choose the image menu and then select reveal all. All right, I'll tap "c" once more, drag out my crop, and if I'd ever want to reset the crop marquee, I can click the first icon. The second icon here will cancel it, but for now all apply the crop. So there you have it. The crop tool makes it easier than ever to remove unwanted areas in the image while still preserving cropped information for flexible image editing.

Contents