Welcome to this Photoshop demo. This is Aaron from PhotoshopDemos.com. I’m going to be showing you how to crop an image. This Photoshop CS3 tutorial is primarily available in video format, but there’s also a transcription below.

So whenever you have an image that you wish to select a section from or you just want like a specific area to show up, you can start by clicking on the Marquee tool here, the rectangular Marquee, and you can select a section of your photograph. And then come up to Image and then just do Crop.

That’s the most basic way. That will allow you to get the exact area that you want. Now, I’m going to undo this. And there’s another tool that you can use. This is actually the Crop tool. And what the Crop tool will allow you to do…I’m just going to make this selection here…is it actually lets you see, with this kind of darker background, exactly the area that you’re going to crop. So you have a little bit more of a preview of how that’s going to look.

Now, you can make that as dark or as light as you want just by simply clicking and dragging up here. And then that way you can see exactly how your photo is going to look when it’s finished. You can also just put this back to the default at 75 and just do it that way.

So now when I hit Enter on my keyboard, I now crop that image exactly how I just previewed it. So that’s the second way to preview.

Now with this Crop tool there’s a couple things you can do. You can actually set height and a width. So if you know you want an aspect ratio that fits a 5×7 image, you can simply do 7 pixels in the width and 5 pixels in the height.

And so then when I click and drag, you can see that this is now constrained to a 5×7 image size. So no matter what I do with this area here, I can’t actually change it without first changing those settings. So I’m going to hit Enter and you’ll see that now I have this really, really tiny image here. And you’re probably wondering, “Well why did that happen?”

Well, the reason that actually happened, and I’ll just kinda zoom back out here because I just undid all that, is that when I used the Crop tool, I did set a 7 pixel by 5 pixel aspect ratio. But in the resolution I didn’t change resolution. So it just assumed and it basically made 7 pixels by 5 pixels.

So that’s not exactly what we want to do. So here you are going to want to specify, actually, inches. So if you want a 7×5 inch image, that’s what it’s going to give you. Because this tool, it doesn’t just crop to the exact size that you’ve specified. What it actually does it is resizes at the same exact time. That’s what I wanted to show you that.

So once again, here we are working inches and I have 7 inches by 5 inches. Now when I go to Crop, I’ll actually crop that exact image that I have.

So you can do a similar type of effect where you use the Crop tool, 7 inches by 5 inches, but let’s say we want to change the resolution to, say, like 180 pixels per inch. OK, now we’re going to see something different that happens.

So this is actually going to take this area that I just created, and because I have a 72 pixel per inch image, I am now going to actually scale up this image to be larger in size. So when I hit Enter you’ll see that it actually got larger. The reason being is because even though I stayed within this 7×5 inch aspect ratio, I’ve actually increased my resolution from 72 DPI to 180 pixels per inch.

So just keep in mind if you do that and you do it excessively, like, for instance, if I was to do the same thing but this time I made it 300 pixels per inch and I did the same kind of Crop, and let’s say I went a little bit smaller, you will start to get some blurriness going on here. So you’ll start to see that this is getting a little bit blurry, and that’s because we’re scaling the image up beyond its actual physical size.

And so this image, if we come up to Image now and we go to Image Size, you’ll see that this is now a 7 inch by 5 inch image at 300 pixels per inch. So in pixels that’s actually 2,100 by 1,500 pixels. So that’s just something to just be aware of, is that this Crop tool can be powerful in a lot of ways because you’re not just actually using like the Marquee tool, selecting a size, and then cutting that exact size.

What you’re actually doing is you have the ability to scale with this tool and get very specific about how you actually want to crop your image. So that’s just an additional functionality that I wanted to show you with the Crop tool here.

And there’s some other things that are sort of unique about this, and some of these features may not be available on previous older versions of Photoshop. But with this Crop tool you can also use this Perspective button. And when you turn Perspective on, it will actually allow you to crop an image by tweaking these handles in any way that you like so that you get kind of almost like a 3D effect in a crop.

So if I wanted to, say, crop that section just like that, and let’s say I wanted this out a little bit further just to get a little bit of this mountain in here, kind of almost like a panoramic, and then hit Enter, I now get that image as I cropped it out. And you can see it’s somewhat distorted. If I hit Control+T and actually transform that, I’m going to go into my layers here for a moment and unlock that. You’ll see a little bit of white space up in this corner. I don’t know if you can see that. I’ll zoom in just a second and you can see that where the image kind of got chopped a little bit.

But you can see that it kind of tweaked this image, if you will, based on that perspective that I chose. So that’s just an additional feature that’s available that may not be the effect that you’re going for. I just wanted to show you that it is available.

So I’ll do that again. This time I’m going to actually unlock this layer and I’m going to use that same effect there. I’m going to put that in the center and I’m going to leave the perspective on. And then this time I’m going to go ahead and tweak this again here, make it a little bit more maybe extreme this time so you can kinda see what’s going on.

Then go ahead and hit Enter. And now it’s really stretched that image out. And if I come up to my layers here, hit Control+T, you can see that it still stayed within that size. It actually doesn’t go beyond the borders. But it gives you this kind of funky kind of stretched out look, kind of perspective look based on that perspective that you choose.

This is an extreme example, but you can actually use it to straighten out images just by kinda tweaking the perspective a little bit in case you’re maybe scanning in some photos or maybe the angle that you took the shot you used a wide angle lens and it kinda stretched things out a bit. You can actually correct a little bit of that when you’re doing some cropping.

So anyway, that’s really the basics of cropping in Photoshop. There’s some other advanced techniques that you can do. But definitely play around with this technique and play around with the Crop tool that’s over here in your toolbar. Very easy tool to get to and access. And just remember all your options are up here in the top section of the menu bar.

So have fun with that and we’ll see you in the next video. Thanks for watching. This is Aaron from PhotoshopDemos.com.