Cropping an image - Photoshop Tutorial

- [Instructor] Where we're going to begin in this chapter, is by cropping this image. One, to make it slightly more dynamic than it is already and two, as the basis for our 600 by 300 hero image. We'll start by tapping C on our keyboard, which will get us the crop tool. If it doesn't, or if you're worried about that, just go across to the toolbox and note the tool icon there that is illuminated, and long press on that to reveal all of the tools and it should be the one at the top. Now we're going to use the options bar here to help us out with our sizing. Now at the moment it may well say ratio just there, but what we're actually going to go for is width times height times resolution. So if we choose that, then we have some fields into which we can type. So in the first field, we're going to type 600 and then we need to type the units that we want to use, so we're going to type PX there for pixels. You can tab across or click across into the next field where we'll enter the value 300 just there and again PX after that, that's all important. Then in the next field, we're going to type the resolution that we're after, that we want our end result to be in, so 144 is what we're after, pixels per inch. And the reason for that is we're going for retina screens. Okay used to be 72, but then retina came along and that changed and now they need more pixels in there, so 144 pixels an inch just there. And if you tab across, that's it, it should be set. Now you don't need to hold down any additional keys here, you can simply drag these corners, up to date versions don't need the shift key, however if you notice yours is distorting, then you probably do, however it shouldn't do that. What I'm doing here is with this rule of thirds grid I've got, is I'm aligning some action points within that so basically, the first intersection and the second intersection on the left hand side. Now this grid's very, very useful and it's the basis of many, many different compositions. It's been around for a long time, it's the most commonly used form of actually dividing an image up because it's really, really straightforward. However if you want to use a different system, there's this icon up here at the top in the options bar, and you can click there and choose from another kind if you actually want to use that, so once we're pretty much there, and I think that's pretty much it for this one maybe just a shade more there, and just get just the top of the head coming in to that side. Once we're happy with that, what we can do is we can hit the big tick at the top, don't worry about that zooming out like that if you now use Command + Zero or Ctrl + Zero to fit that to the screen, we'll see that at the biggest it can be shown. Of course it's much, much larger than it would actually be, but there we are we can see that. Okay, if you want to see it at size just do Command + One or Control + One and it will jump to the size. All we need to do now is do a save as on this file. So file, save as, then if we go out to our desktop and into the folder we've created for this, the little system just here, we can go ahead and save this as 600 by 300 so 600 x 300 hero just there like so I think that will be just fine for now. And then once you've done that all we need to do make sure it says Photoshop which it should but hit save and there we are.