Learn how to expertly manipulate your images with the crop tool in Adobe Photoshop. The article explores the functionalities and options of the tool, providing practical insights into cropping and saving images without losing any pixels.
Key Insights
- When cropping an image in Photoshop, it's crucial to save your file immediately, as cropping changes the dimensions of your file without creating a backup image.
- The 'Delete Cropped Pixels' option, when unchecked, allows Photoshop to retain the areas and pixels cropped from an image, enabling more room for errors and adjustments without losing any part of the image.
- Photoshop's crop tool comes with built-in capabilities like different crop ratios, the ability to add grids by rule of third or diagonal grids, and even the ability to tilt the entire photo, offering more control and flexibility in image cropping.
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In this video we'll be working with the crop tool. Let's begin by opening our file.
In this video we'll be using the staff photo jpeg and we'll click open. The first thing that's important about cropping is that we won't have a backup image because when we crop it'll actually change the dimensions of our file. Therefore instead we're going to save our file immediately by going to file, save as.
We'll save this as a photoshop file and add the word adjusted to the end of the file name and hit ENTER. Next let's begin cropping. We can use the crop tool found on the left in the tools bar and when you click on it you'll see that we have a white border around the image.
The first thing that we're going to want to do is go to our options bar and uncheck delete cropped pixels. What this does is it allows photoshop to not delete the areas and pixels that we've previously cropped. Thus it allows us to have more mistakes and make more adjustments to our crop without losing part of our image.
So let's begin cropping. We can do it most simply by simply dragging the corners or dragging the size of our image to crop it. When we have a crop that we like we can simply hit ENTER or click the check mark found in the options bar and here we have a cropped image.
If we want to crop again we can go back to our crop tool and we can begin adjusting it. To set the parameters of our crop we can simply go to ratio and find the ratio we're looking for. For example let's choose square and we'll see that we have a square ratio for our image.
We can drag the image to the center and we can also adjust how large the crop is. As we click and drag we'll see that it will maintain the square shape because the ratio is set to square. We can hit ENTER to save our crop and here we have a tight cropped image of our face.
Let's use the crop tool again and let's now change the ratio to 16 × 9. We'll then drag the corners out so that we can get more of our image and as you'll see when you drag if you drag too far you'll start to get the checkerboard background indicating that there's no image left on that side. Let's center the 16 × 9 crop closer to the center and hit ENTER and here we have a 16 × 9 crop of her face. To clear the crop that we've set we can simply go to clear if we want to start over from ratio.
Let's now use a 4 × 5 crop and we can again expand it so that we have a crop that's slightly larger than her face and hit ENTER. As you can see Photoshop has built in many different capabilities for the crop tool to be able to adjust and not have the pixels around the image deleted. We also have the opportunity to add grids by rule of third or diagonal grids being able to center our image.
Let's choose diagonal grid and click and drag and we'll see that her face is lined up diagonally in the middle. We'll adjust the height a little more so that her eyes are on each side giving us a proper frame for our image and there are guides like this to be able to help us center images and create consistency when we're working with multiple images. For example it may be that in our images the eyes are on each side of the diagonal lines with the nose being in the middle and part of the lips or if we change this again in our options bar and use the rule of thirds it may be that both eyes and chin must be in the center square.
By using guides like this we're able to add consistency to our photos. One last use of the crop tool is if we go to the top right or any of the corners we can see that we get arrows around the corners. If we click on these we can actually tilt the entire photo to crop it appropriately.
In this instance I'll crop it slightly to the left to match our bricks and adjust a little bit more to the right. It's pretty even already and then drag it just to the left and hit ENTER. Here we have a nice four by five cropped image of our staff member.
Let's save this file using CTRL S on our keyboard and hit ENTER or click ok and now we have a saved file. In the next video we'll be working with lens calibration. See you there!