Photoshop Tutorial: Everything You Need to Know About the Crop Tool
How to Use the Crop Tool in Adobe Photoshop CC
In this Photoshop basics tutorial, you'll learn how to use the Crop tool, one of the most important tools you'll use in Photoshop, no matter what profession you’re in. With it, you can crop and straighten images to create focus in photos or strengthen the composition of an image.
Disclosure: I am not affiliated with Adobe Photoshop in any way, other than simply owning a licensed subscription to the service.
Transcript:
I’m currently working with a flat image, so it’s only one layer, as you can see in the Layers window.
Go ahead and select the Crop tool from the Tools window.
As you can see, the cropping box appears right away around the perimeter of the image, and by default, gives you the Rules of Third grid to help you better compose the image during a crop. You can immediately click anywhere on the image to drag and drop your crop area, or you can adjust from the sides or corners of the boundaries.
Up top in the Options toolbar you’ll see all of the adjustments you can make to the Crop tool, one of the most important being “Delete Cropped Pixels”. If you have this checked, whenever you crop and image, the cropped out portion of it will be deleted for good, and the only way to recover it is with an undo or via the History, which only goes back so far. With this option un-checked, you will be able to recrop from the original image, instead of just cropping in smaller from the cropped version.
Now that we know are full image is safe, let’s adjust our image. Just drag and side or corner in to get your perfect crop boundaries, then crop it by hitting Enter or using the checkmark. You can also right-click and select Crop, or going up to Image in the menu and select Crop.
If you don’t like the crop, you can undo it, or you can simply click on the image again, if you have Delete Cropped Pixels off, and try again.
Plus, if you go back to using the default Move tool, you can adjust the image inside of the cropped boundaries, without resizing the actual crop.
If the image is a little bit crooked, you can fine tune using the Straighten tool up top. Once you drag and drop your area, let go and it’ll automatically adjust. You just need to apply it. You can also access the Straighten tool but holding the Command button down.
If you know what size you want to crop to, you can set that in the Size and Proportions area. To use a ration, simple select that, choose a preset, or input your ratio. If you accidentally swapped your numbers, you can just take the corner of the boundaries and pull it away to change the orientation. Ratios maintain the original size and resolution of your image. You can also hit the Swap button.
You can also change the actual size and resolution to exact dimensions and pixel ratios if you want too. Choose a preset or enter your own. This image is 240 pixels/inch, but let’s change it to 72.
If you’re not using a predefined ration or size, and you’ve found the perfect ratio, you can right-click and choose to use the current crop box aspect ratio, which will lock that in. You can use to adjust the crop boundaries without changing the ratio using the Shift key while dragging the corners.
To go back to the original image’s ratio, just right-click and select that option.
You can also use other keyboard tricks, like holding down Option or Alt key while dragging a corner to change all side of the box at the same time, or use it on the sides to change opposite sides together.
Also, you can hold down Shift and click anywhere on the image to start a new crop zone. Just hold Shift down, left-click, start dragging, and let go of Shift. If you keep holding Shift down, you’ll be forced into a square ratio.
Depending on what you’re working on, the Rule of Thirds overlay may not be the best for you. You can change it up in the Overlay options, or you can press O on your computer to cycle through them until you find the one you want.
The last big thing to talk about is the Crop options settings menu.
And that’s it for Crop Tool. There’s actually a lot more you can do with it, especially when you have multiple layers, but for now, this should give you a good overview of the basics.