Adobe Photoshop CC - Essentials Training

How to crop an image in Adobe Photoshop CC

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, this video is all about cropping. You might think, "Hey, cropping is not that exciting, I'm going to skip along." You can, but there are some secret tricks in this video, I promise. Things like deleting crop pixels, and rotating it. Hang around, it's not a long video, let's get started. 

First thing, 'File', 'Open'. In your 'Exercise Files', there is a folder called '04 Cropping', and let's open up 'Cropping 01', Now on your Tool panel over here, grab this fifth tool down, the 'Crop tool'. You notice, in Photoshop if you hover above these tools long enough-- watch this, if I hover above it you're not sure what the icon does, these little things pop out, kind of explaining what they are, this is the Crop Tool. Crop tool is easy to use, grab any of these corners that appear. So this right one here, I'm going to crop it in, so it's-- those shoes are a bit more central. When you've got it where you want it to be, hit 'Enter' on your keyboard and that's it, you've done some cropping. 

Let me show you some other ways of doing it. Let's go to 'Edit', 'Step Backward'. Even though I'm on my Crop Tool, I can't see the edges, kind of just click on it again. Pops back into life. Now what I want to do is I want to proportionately crop it. I don't want to just kind of randomly pick a size. I want it to be the same height and width. And that's true-- who could guess what shortcut I hold down to kind of lock the height and the width? You guessed it, it's Shift, hold 'Shift' down. It means that when I'm holding down shift, the height and the width are the same. So I'm going to get it to be there, and then click 'Enter'. 

More tricks with the Crop Tool. Let's go 'Edit', 'Step Backward', click on the tool again. What I'm going to do is crop it in, it doesn't really matter. Going to crop it kind of there. And what you can do now is, you can do two things. You can move it around by clicking and dragging anywhere in here and it does kind of weird, it drags the image, not the crop, I find that weird, but anyway. Say you want to kind of move it over here to about there, perfect. Let's say you want to rotate it a little bit as well. So all you need to do is just hover anywhere outside, anywhere. Can you see the little bent arrow? That guy there, click, hold, and drag. If you're like, I'm not sure if you are like me but I find this is a really weird thing that happens. Click, hold it, give it a wiggle around, see what you want. This can be really handy if there's like a horizon line. It maybe not straight, you can kind of drag it, and get these lines to line up. So get it, move it around, get it just practicing I guess with this Crop Tool. Then when you've got it where you want, hit 'Return'. Awesome! 

Now there's one last thing for this particular Crop technique, is I'm going to go to 'undo' again, go back to my 'Crop Tool'. There's this option up here that says 'Delete Cropped Pixels' that's on by default, I'm pretty sure. Check yours, if you're working on an old version of Photoshop it's not going to be there, it's reasonably new. With it on, it means when I crop it down, and hit 'Return' and let's say I grab my 'Move Tool' now, unlock the layer by naming it. I can just move it around. You can see, it's kind of cropped it down, and deleted any excess, it's gone from the edge there. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to 'Edit', 'Step Backward' quite a few times until I got my big image back. I'll show you the difference. 

With the Crop Tool here let's turn that off and now I'm going to crop it down so I'm going to crop it to there, hit 'Enter' on my keyboard, it looks the same, right? But if I grab my 'Move Tool' now, watch what happens. Can you see, all that stuff that we cropped off is actually still up there. It's hidden and won't kind of say 'Print' but it is still there. Now I find I keep that on all the time, or uncheck it all the time. So 'Crop Tool', I make sure that's never on. It's useful, sometimes you want crop, it might be stuff you just don't need, you want to get rid of it. I find I'll leave it off because then it gives me the option to go back later on go to my 'Move Tool' and go, "Actually I want to kind of just adjust it a little bit." So that's the basic cropping in Photoshop. Let's get in and do some specific size cropping in the next video.