From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

Using the Crop tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

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Using the Crop tool

- [Instructor] There are a variety of reasons that you might want to crop your image in Photoshop. In this case I needed to stack several neutral density filters on my lens in order to slow the shutter speed to get the long exposure of the water. So let's take a look at the crop tool, but before we do, I just want to point out that we're working on a background right now, because we're going to take a look at some options where that automatically turn verts it into a layer. But for now I'll tap C for the crop tool. You'll notice that Photoshop automatically adds a crop Marquis around the entire image, but when you first select the crop tool, you can just click and drag anywhere in your image. In order to drag out your own marquee, then you can use any of the handles in order to resize the crop marquee and you can reposition it by simply dragging in the center. By default, the crop is unconstrained, but once you've dragged out a crop, you can hold down the Shift key in order to constrain it as you drag. If you want to crop to a specific aspect ratio, you can select from the different presets here or enter in your own values. If you ever want to swap the width and height, just click on the double-headed arrows, to remove the aspect ratio constraints just click clear. By default the crop tool is showing an overlay, in this case it's the rule of thirds, but we can change that by clicking on the overlay icon and selecting from the list, or we can cycle through the overlays using the O key. I prefer to only see the overlay as I'm actually dragging the crop. So I changed from the always show overlay to the auto show overlay. Now on mouse down I can see that rule of thirds, but when I released the cursor, it will hide. Let's go ahead and turn it to always show overlay again, and then tap the O key. And you can see that I'm cycling through the different grid overlays. If I hold down the Shift + O then it's going to change the orientation of the overlay. Alright, I'll tap O again to return to the rule of thirds. By default we can see the background area behind the crop tool, if we want to change the opacity or disable that we can select the gear icon and then uncheck show cropped area or change the opacity by just using the slider here. I'll go ahead and set that back to 75. And then whenever you have a dropdown menu like this, you can tap Enter in order to close the window. Now when you're starting with a background layer, by default Photoshop is going to delete all of the pixels that are outside of the Crop mark key. And if we look at our layers panel, because we started with a background layer, when you add the crop, photoshop is going to show you this crop preview here. And if we apply the crop by clicking on the checkmark, Photoshop will return to this background status, and it's actually removed all of the pixel areas outside of the canvas area. So in fact if I swapped the move tool by tapping the V key, and we unlock the background by clicking on the lock icon, and then we reposition the image, we can see that all of that information has been cropped off. All right, I'm going to revert the file by clicking on the snapshot at the top of the history panel. If your history panel is not showing you can display it by using the window menu or you could revert the file by selecting file and then rever all right, I'll tap the C key again to select the crop tool. And this time I'm going to uncheck the delete cropped pixels. Now as I drag out my crop, Photoshop is going to automatically convert the background and we see a very different crop preview in the layers panel. Let's go ahead and just reposition this. And now when I tap return or enter or click on the check mark to apply that crop, we now have a layer instead of the background. If I select the move tool and I reposition the image, you can see that Photoshop was keeping track of all of the pixels that were beyond the canvas area. Now, because we're working with a layered file, and because Photoshop is holding onto that additional information, our file size will be larger than if we'd chosen to delete the crop pixels. And if you save as a PSD file or a TIF file, Photoshop's going to hang on to all those pixels that are outside of the crop. However if you save as a JPEG or any other format that doesn't support layers, you are going to lose those pixels. If you ever want Photoshop to increase the canvas size, to include any pixels that have been cropped, you can choose image and then reveal all. And finally, if you do drag out a crop and then apply that crop and then you want to crop again, you'll notice that the handles aren't visible. You just need to click anywhere in the image area, and then Photoshop will display the crop marquis. You can make your adjustments and then apply your crop. So there you have it. The crop tool makes it easier than ever to remove distracting elements while preserving cropped information for flexible image editing.

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