From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

Introducing Photoshop’s Crop tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Introducing Photoshop’s Crop tool

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- [Instructor] I'll start things off by introducing you to the crop tool, and also show you how to scale and rotate a crop boundary. And so here, we've got the crop tool that comes with the keyboard shortcut of C, by the way, and notice, as soon as you select it, you're seeing a preview of the crop boundary along with these implied handles right here. But you don't have to drag on the handles. You can just drag on the edges if you want to or you can drag on a corner in order to scale the crop boundary, like so. If you want to scale with respect to the center of the crop boundary, then press the Alt key or the option key issue drag. Now, the real problem with this image is that it's crooked. And when you're evaluating whether an image is crooked or not, you want to look at the horizon line. And so notice if I bring the top of the crop boundary down, that horizon line is way out of plumb. And so your option now is to move your cursor outside the crop boundary just slightly outside and then drag the image in order to rotate it. And then what I like to do in this case is move the top of the crop boundary down. So it's even with the horizon and you can tell it's still not quite straight. And so I'm going to drag the image once again, outside of the crop boundary. If you drag it inside the crop boundary, you're just going to move it around. Alright, I'll press Ctrl + 0 or Cmd + 0 on the Mac, to center my zoom. And so you can zoom and pan just as you normally would, while you're using the crop tool, then I'll just go ahead and drag this guy over here so that I'm keeping more or less as much of the image as I can. Notice here, I'm going to end up with a white wedge because we're running out of imagery. So we'll bring this edge back like so. And then when I'm happy with what I see, all you have to do is click on the check mark up here in the Options bar, or press the Enter key on the PC or the Return key on the Mac. If you want to abandon your changes, you just click on the Cancel button or you can just press the Escape key. And you know, I think I have a little bit of additional height that I can work with here. So I'll take the top of the crop boundary up. And I'll take the bottom down a little bit. And by the way, you have a single undo when you're working with the crop tool. So nowadays, if I drag this guy all the way over here, so we have this big white wedge, I can press Ctrl + Z, or Cmd + Z on the Mac to undo that change. But if I press Ctrl + Z or Cmd + Z again, then I redo that change. That's not what I want, I want to undo. So I'll press Ctrl + Z or Cmd + Z on a Mac and then I'll just press the Enter key in order to accept that crop. And I'll press Ctrl + 0 or Cmd + 0 on the Mac to center my zoom. And those are the basics of how you scale and rotate a crop boundary using the dedicated crop tool here inside Photoshop.

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