5 Secrets of the Photoshop Crop Tool
If you’re used to clicking the crop tool dragging the tool over your image and pressing Enter, it may surprise you to know that there are other options that you can use when cropping in Photoshop.
Here are my five “best-kept secrets” of the Photoshop crop tool.
1. Rotate as you Crop
When you drag the crop marquee over an image, you can rotate it by letting go the mouse button and drag on one of the corners of the marquee to rotate it. When you double click you will rotate and crop the image at the one time.
2. Perspective Crop
You can fix perspective at the same time as cropping by first dragging a crop marquee over the image. Let go the mouse button and click the Perspective checkbox on the toolbar. Now when you drag on a corner of the marquee the corners move independently of each other allowing you to position the marquee along the lines you want to crop to in the image. When you crop the image it is cropped and distorted to create a rectangular image. You can use this to fix distorted perspective in your images.
3. The Crop that’s not a Crop
Once you have selected an area to crop, you do not actually have to crop it, and you can, instead, simply hide the cropped area rather than permanently deleting it.
To do this, you need to be working on an image layer and not the background layer so double-click the background layer and convert it to a regular layer. Drag a crop rectangle over the image and from the tool options bar, select the Hide option. When you double click the cropped area will be hidden but still accessible.
You can now select the Move tool and reposition the image inside the area that you have cropped it to. This is useful when you want to crop an image to 4 x 6 in size and you want to experiment with different ways to compose the image within this area.
4 Create and Use Crop Presets
When you click the Crop tool you can choose from various presets by clicking the dropdown list to the immediate right of the tool in the tool options bar. Click a preset and drag on the image to create the crop marquee. You can turn a portrait crop to a landscape one (or vice versa) by selecting the preset, drag over the image and then rotate the marquee ninety degrees by holding the Shift key as you do so to constrain the rotation to multiples of 15 degrees.
To create your own preset, set the width, height and resolution in the tool options bar and then click the fly-out menu for the crop tool and select New Tool Preset. Give your preset a name and click Ok. It will appear at the foot of the presets list and you can select and use it anytime in the future.
5 Crop to the Same Size
To crop two images to the same size, select the Crop tool and make active the image you want to match the size of. Click the Front Image button on the tool options bar to configure the Crop tool with the dimensions of the front image.
Select the image you want to crop and drag a crop rectangle over that image. When you double-click to finish, the image will be cropped to the same size and resolution as the original image – in some situations this may mean that the image will have increased in size.
Warning:
If the Crop tool isn’t working as expected, press Esc to exit the tool and click the Clear button to reset it – some settings are sticky and you may not remember you had set it to special crop settings earlier in an editing session.
Next time you go to crop an image, remember that there are more options for the crop tool than may initially meet the eye.
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55 Responses to “5 Secrets of the Photoshop Crop Tool” - Add Yours
August 6th, 2009 at 2:07 am
Thanks for sharing that useful information!
August 6th, 2009 at 2:50 am
Thanks, these are great tips!
August 6th, 2009 at 2:55 am
Thanks for the tips! I do have a strange question, though, wondering if anyone has experienced this.
I use Photoshop Elements 7 on Vista. Every now and then, my Crop functionality locks up. That is, when I try to click in the toolbar — say, to change the ratio of the crop from “no restrictions” to “8×10″ — nothing happens. The little drop-down menu changes color from gray to lighter gray, but no drop-down menu appears. Hitting Reset does nothing; I have to completely close the Editor and re-launch it for it to be like normal.
I’ve only noticed this on Crop — not on any other tool. Any thoughts?
August 6th, 2009 at 3:42 am
Excellent!!. It’s god to learn some new tricks a day
August 6th, 2009 at 5:00 am
That was ridiculously useful. Thanks!
August 6th, 2009 at 6:04 am
@Ed: Is there any tick in the toolbar, this may be required to finish the crop. It may also happen if you try to transform any shapes or layers. Just checking – you may or may not know this. If not – I have never had this problem. Hope I helped.
August 6th, 2009 at 7:24 am
Helen,
A very nice post. Very concise and well written. I learned something new in a very short time. I’m looking forward to more. One thing I always do before cropping in Photoshop is make a copy of the image for later if needed. Also, if you’re working in camera raw, cropping there first will allow you to go back and recover the original image later by clicking the crop button again.
August 6th, 2009 at 7:30 am
Very helpful tips as always! The example photos look really familiar. I wonder if they were taken in Singapore.
August 6th, 2009 at 10:33 am
This was really useful, thanks
August 6th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Very nice. I’m pretty proficient with photoshop, but I was unaware of the perspective crop!
August 6th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
thanks! presets are cool
but sometimes I crop with rotate but it rotate not working. why?
August 6th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
i you use the preset sizes, easiest way to rotate 90º is to just click the lil button between the two dimensions.
August 6th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
I love the crop tool. It’s one of the things that has improved my photography massively over the past year or so. These tips should help to enhance them.
August 6th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
This was useful, thanks – I’ll especially try out tip 3. And I’m pretty sure the photos are from Singapore!
August 6th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Great tips…wish they worked in PSE7. :(
August 6th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Gosh, I hadn’t heard of Helen Bradley since she used to write for PC User Magazine in Australia.
August 6th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
@tyler – no, there’s nothing. I can do everything as normal in crop, except change the stuff on the toolbar. So I can make a crop box in the image, resize it, even actually crop – but I cannot change the options such as “no restrictions” or “8×10″ or “photo ratio.”
I posted this on the Adobe forums, and someone said this is a common problem. She recommended to use the rectangular marquee selection and then use Image>Crop as a workaround.
August 7th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Anybody know if the crop tool re-samples when it resizes?
August 7th, 2009 at 1:45 am
Hi?it’s a good article.
Is the picture in Tip 2 from Singapore? Or maybe all of them?
August 7th, 2009 at 1:49 am
Awesome tips being new to photo shop I aprreciate them!
August 7th, 2009 at 1:53 am
@Chuck: The crop tool will have to resample when it resizes to a different size image. For example you can make the crop tool upsize an image (as mentioned in the text) or downsize it by setting the crop size and resolution. In this case it is my understanding that the resampling algorithm used is the one you have configured in your preferences. Choose Edit > Preferences > General and check the Image Interpolation setting to see what it is set to.
@Bryce – I still do!
@Michelle/@zack.. good catch, yes, they are all from Singapore.
August 7th, 2009 at 3:48 am
I got a 6th tip. You can use also the crop tool to add canvas. First drag a box with the crop tool. When you move your marque outside the picture, and crop it will add extra pixels.
August 7th, 2009 at 5:00 am
Thank you—wonderful Crop tool secrets. #3 (Crop that’s not a Crop) is really slick! Love how that worked, even though I almost always work in camera raw when I crop a photo.
August 7th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Freaking marvelous. Thanks very much!
August 7th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Having been using photoshop for +10 years, I can count the number of times I’ve used the crop tool on one hand — usually selecting the area (M), then Image –> Crop instead. Now I feel dumb knowing that it is actually a powerful tool. thanks! :)
August 7th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Thank you very much :)
August 7th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
I use crop more often than I probably should and yet I didn’t know all 5 of these points, thanks for saving me time!
August 7th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
I have been using Photoshop for 6 years to edit Senior portraitsand I never knew about the perspective tool. That rocks! Thanks so much for sharing this article.
August 7th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
One more to add to the list: I often need to have a bigger artspace when working on web images. A quick way to make your palette larger is hit the F key twice to go to full screen mode (This is better for many other things too like zooming) Now, if you crop, you can crop larger than your image and it will expand the palette and fill with whatever background color.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
I would love to have information like this for each of the PS tools!
August 8th, 2009 at 12:13 am
Thank you Helen. There are a few things here I was not aware of!
August 8th, 2009 at 12:26 am
My favorite crop tip is this:
1. Expand your current window to be larger than the current canvas size (you’ll see the grey border around your canvas)
2. Use the crop tool
3. Drag one of the sides of your crop marquee outside the canvas (into the grey area) to increase your canvas size.
August 8th, 2009 at 12:30 am
Such great tips, even for an old pro!!! Thank you!
August 8th, 2009 at 2:30 am
There is surely a sixth use for the Crop tool viz. increase the canvas size. This is done by dragging the Crop tool over the whole image. Then grab a corner box and you will find it can be dragged beyond the image. Do this for other sides and when you click the tick canvas is made to the colour of the background colour. Clearly you need to maximise the image beforehand by clicking on the small square at the top right of the image.
August 8th, 2009 at 2:35 am
I never knew about this options. Thanks for sharing the tips, cropping will be more fun now. Thank you.
August 8th, 2009 at 4:32 am
Sometimes I think I know everything. Normally doesn’t last too long. At least three times in the article above I went “Ohhh..!” Thanks!
August 8th, 2009 at 6:55 am
If you want to use the ‘Front Image’ option without resampling your image, just change your units from pixels to inches and leave the ‘Resolution’ field blank. The cropped image will maintain the proper proportions and will have proportionately fewer pixels per inch, but will not be resampled.
August 8th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
more ways to crop “annoying” parts :) thanks
August 8th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Cool tips.. Thanks.. !!!!
August 8th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Thanks so much for these tips. I can’t believe that I’ve never found this out before and I’m an avid Photosahop user. I always use the selection tool. Now I know.
August 9th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Very good post, but it doesn’t address a problem that I find devilish in cropping, which is what to do with the little “perspective” star in the middle of the picture.
More specifically, when I shoot a picture from an angle -a building, for example — and want to crop it to appear as if it was shot from directly in front of the building, I am easily able, using the “perspective” tool, to give the building perfect vertical and horizontal lines. But I am often left, particularly when I have shot from a sharply acute angle (as in a narrow street) with a messed-up perspective; i.e., with a situation in which the far side of the picture is disproportionately large. I assume this can be corrected with the little star: if not, how CAN this problem be fixed?
Many thanks,
August 11th, 2009 at 1:33 am
Dear Michael,
Assuming you’re using CS3 or better, go to Filter/Distort/Lens Correction/transform horizontal perspective (and do it in 16-bit)
Regards,
Alex
August 11th, 2009 at 8:06 am
I appreciate your taking the time to put this together. It looks like you spent quite a bit of time, screenshots and everything! Thanks for the info, it was very helpful.
August 11th, 2009 at 10:18 am
I use this crop tool a lot but I didn’t know that there are still many ways on how to use it effectively. Thanks for the tips :-)
August 12th, 2009 at 11:37 am
It’s the simplest things that get over looked are usually the most important to creativity.
Great article! Thanks for sharing.
Of all the things in the thick book that comes with photoshop software this is one of the must read sections, along with layering.
August 13th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
thank you for the tips ;)
August 22nd, 2009 at 5:37 am
Thank you so much , for this information. So many useful tips
Must have taken you lots of time
September 11th, 2009 at 9:42 am
I couldn’t find a solution to my problem here – how to constrain the crop to a ratio (3:2) but without resizing. I found a solution here. Just put the image size to 100% or larger, make an initial selection with the crop tool of a small number of pixels (e.g. 300×200), then press SHIFT while dragging the corner control handles.
September 14th, 2009 at 2:03 am
Thanks for the tips!
October 1st, 2009 at 2:55 am
I’m trying to do #4, creating and using the cop preset sizes. I am using CS4 on a Mac. I can get it create the preset, but when I click and drag over the image, nothing happens. Any ideas as to why?
Thanks.
October 9th, 2009 at 12:29 am
the crop tool is rubbish, what if i want to set it to 300px width what do i have to do? and why cant i set my measurements after i dragged the crop out its so stupid, Corel Paint Shop Pro is better!
November 22nd, 2009 at 12:29 am
Yeah, great article…and very simple =)
thanks!
January 16th, 2010 at 6:01 am
@sean: Corel is not better than photoshop, learn to work with it :)
January 18th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
nice tips you share here – many thanks! – will certainly be stopping on back!
January 23rd, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Wow! Front Image button is so useful. I can NOT believe I didn’t know that. Thank you.
Thank you.Thank you.Thank you.Thank you.
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