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Last Updated on October 23, 2022
We use the Crop tool to remove parts of a photo or image. We can also use it to straighten photographs and even to add extra space around our images. This guide to Cropping will help you learn how to use these tools and functions in Photoshop.
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The Crop tool in Photoshop removes or hides whatever part of the image you choose. It’s an essential tool for anyone working with images and is useful for helping to create a focus in your photograph and for removing distractions in an image. With each version of Photoshop, the Crop tool has improved.
In this short guide, I’ll show you how to make a basic crop on your image and some of the options you have available to you when you’re cropping.
The video shows you how to use both the Crop Tool and the Marquee Tool to crop an image.
Notice the dimmed area that appears outside of the cropping border. This is the bit that will get cropped away.
If you want to keep the proportions of your crop to be the same as your original image, press and hold the Shift key as you drag the cropping handles. You can also move your image within the cropping area by clicking on the image itself and dragging it.
Et Voila! Your beautifully cropped image appears.
Stepping back a little, if you want to cancel a crop while the cropping border is still on your image, you can either press Esc on the keyboard or, click on the Cancel Crop icon in the Options bar at the top of the screen.
If you’ve already committed or confirmed a crop, just undo by pressing Cmd + Z (Mac) or Ctrl + Z (PC). That will take you back one step.
When you start to drag with one of the cropping handles, The Rule of Thirds overlay grid appears by default. If you like to adhere to the Rule of Thirds with your photography, this is very useful, but there are other Overlay Options available too. Here’s how to find them.
Here’s a visual overview of each:
Grid Overlay
Diagonal Overlay
Triangle Overlay
Golden Ratio
Golden Spiral
Finally, on the overlay options, there are three other settings in the menu:
We’ve just seen how to do the most basic crop i.e. click on the tool, the crop borders appear on your image and then you drag the handles. However, you can also just select the Crop tool and simply drag over the area you want to crop.
It doesn’t matter that there is already a cropping border around the image, you can just click and drag out then release the mouse. Your new cropping area will appear and if you need to adjust it you can use the handles as before.
So that’s the fundamentals of cropping. There are other tricks you can perform with the Crop tool and we’ll return to it at another time.
Now that you know how to use the Crop Tool to remove or hide part of an image, check out this tutorial where I show you how to make the canvas BIGGER using the Crop tool.
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Thanks for reading! I hope you found this useful and I would be very grateful if you could share it. 🙂
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