Freelance Photographer
Seeing things differently
A taker of Photographs - A creator of images

The Crop Tool...

We’ve all used the crop tool at some time or other to crop images to achieve a better composition but do we use it to its full potential... Here I will try to show that simple cropping is not all that the tool can do and maybe a shortcut or two that might come in useful while using it... Firstly I will give those shortcuts that I mentioned:-

• Pressing the ´C´ key on the keyboard will automatically select the Crop tool...
• When you´ve selected your crop area double clicking with the left mouse button inside the crop area will activate the crop instead of pressing the Enter or Return keys...
• Holding down the Shift key while selecting the crop will ensure the crop is exactly square...
• After making your selection the crop can actually be moved using the up, down, left or right arrow keys on your keyboard as well as click and dragging...
Now to show you some things you might not know about this versatile tool... The first toolbar you see at the top of your screen has many options some of which are overlooked... The image below shows that toolbar set for an 8 ins x 10 ins crop in portrait mode set at 300 pixels per inch, 300 ppi being the optimum resolution for printing... When you have typed in the measurements and resolution of the image you wish the crop, in the parts marked in green, it will only crop to that size and resolution... If you wish to change to a landscape format all you have to do is click on the two way arrows between the width and height boxes to switch it over... When you are finished you can click the Clear button shown in red to clear the settings...

Alternatively you could save the settings as a New Tool Preset by clicking on the little downward pointing arrow marked in green (shown on the image left) which will bring up a drop down list... Then by clicking on the New Tool Preset icon marked in red on the image left... This will bring up another window like the one below; now all you have to do is type in a descriptive name for the preset so you will easily recognise it... Then click OK... The next time you want to do an 8 x 10 crop you just need to click on the arrow near the crop tool and select your preset tool from the drop down list...

Now for two creative uses of the crop tool, perspective and rotate... When you have made your selection for cropping the toolbar at the top Photoshop changes to the one below...

The Shield Color is the colour that is shown outside the cropped area of your image and the Opacity is the strength of that colour... I like to leave it at 75% so I can see through the shield to exactly where I want to crop just in case I want to reposition the crop... The Perspective box, if ticked, brings a whole new dimension to the tool as this allows you to free transform your crop... Below you will see a couple of examples of how this might be useful...

Here you can see that after selecting my crop I have decided to alter the angle of the horizon so I have moved the bottom right corner handle up a bit... Now when I double click inside the crop it will automatically straighten the image out as seen below... You don’t have to stop at one corner all the handles can be pulled or pushed to correct the perspective... The only thing to be careful with is don’t move them too far as this may distort your image...

The crop tool can also be used to actually rotate the image while cropping...

To put a different slant on the image, pun intended, we can move the cursor outside the image at any of its corners and the cursor will change... Now you can rotate the image in any direction you wish... Also by moving the little target in the Centre (click, hold and drag) you can change the axis on which the image rotates... When you double click inside your crop the image will be cropped and rotated at the same time... You may see a lot of images with a sloping horizon like this today, I don’t know whether it is just a passing trend; though I’m not a lover of the style I just thought I would pass it on to you...