Quite often it is necessary to crop a digital photo in such a way that the resulting image contains only one of the images of the original version. This is called photo cropping. How to do this is the subject of this article.
Pruning targets
Cropping images is necessary in many situations. For example, in this way you can get rid of unnecessary details of the background and interior. For example, remove photos of strangers and random people in a family photo taken in a park or on the beach, or cut off an unaesthetic interior detail that also accidentally fell into the frame (for example, dishes in a photo from a cafe or restaurant). Secondly, you can change the proportions of the image and correct the composition of the photo by making a certain object in its center. Finally, cropping opens up great possibilities when working with images of people and animals: you can cut out a figure of a person, a portrait or an image of a group of people who are in the crowd in the original picture.
Photoshop tools
So, cropping is the selection of the necessary fragment of the photo and cutting off the excess. This is one of the most basic and at the same time one of the simplest manipulations. In Photoshop, it can be done using a special crop tool (crop tool) or use the main menu command “crop” (crop). Both of these methods are alternatives to each other, but the first provides more options for adjusting the borders of the desired part of the photo compared to the second.
Cutting with a special tool
The main sequence when cropping is to select the required fragment and confirm the command.
Open the image, on the "Tools" panel, select "Crop tool" (Crop tool). Now you need to select a portion of the image as if you were using the Selection tool. You need to draw a rectangle with this tool: select the cropping area, place the cursor in its upper left corner, press the left mouse button and do not release. Now move the cursor to the lower right corner of the rectangle (the part of the image that will remain after cropping) and release the mouse button. Now the entire area that will be clipped (removed) has become darkened. The last step in framing is to confirm the command: press the "enter" key. After pressing it, the darkened area will be removed. As a result, the file should be the fragment that you selected with the crop tool.
Changing the original selection area
Crop photo usingThe Crop command in Photoshop is useful not only because the part of the image being cut off is darkened, as a result of which it is visually easy to determine how the new version of the image will look like. The main advantage of this method is that you can easily adjust the initial selection area. Once you've drawn a rectangle, you can change its size, proportions, orientation, and position. Move the cursor to the borders of the selected area, press the left mouse button and drag any of its corners or any face - in any direction. You can also bring the cursor to the outer corner of the area and drag up or down in a circle to rotate the rectangle around its axis (after cropping, the program will rotate the image and position it so that the sides are vertical and horizontal). In addition, the area can also be adjusted by moving: you need to place the cursor inside the image and drag.
Cropping with selection
The second way to crop is to use the Crop command. On the Tools panel, select the Rectangular marquee tool and select the rectangle: move the cursor to the upper left corner of the rectangle that should remain after cropping, press the left mouse button and drag the cursor to the lower right corner. As a result, a fragment of the image will be selected. Now select the "Crop" command in the "Image" menu item, the image will be cropped.
Preparing for fine framing
Forprecise framing, you can highlight the future rectangle with guides. This method is useful when you need to mark very precise boundaries on a large image and when their visual definition is not enough. For example, the border should pass through the object that is visible only when the image is greatly enlarged. In this case, it is convenient to first outline the exact location of the future edge of the rectangle, and then select it.
Save document
One of the most common cropping mistakes is saving a new version of an image without saving the original. It is often necessary to return to the original photo, or cropping fails.
In order not to make a mistake and save only a new, cropped photo, you need to create a duplicate of the photo before working with it. By the way, this can be done whenever you plan to make any changes to the image and are not sure that the original photo will never be needed.
Open the file, in the menu item "Image" (Image) select "Duplicate" (Duplicate). Save a duplicate of the image and make changes to it without fear that they will fail or look like failure in the future.
The second way is to save the cropped image under a new name (using the "Save As" command), but the psychological nuance is that many even professional designers often forget about it - especially with large amounts of work, processing at the same time several photos orduring multi-stage work, to which they periodically return during the working day.
Cropping by copying
It is worth mentioning the cases when it is necessary not only to crop the image, but to cut out a fragment from it for further insertion into another file and create photo collages. Doing this with cropping is not entirely rational, since mounting an image from several fragments does not require saving these fragments as files. For these purposes, there is a more convenient and faster way - by copying.
Open the file from which you want to cut a part of it, select it with the appropriate tool, first, if necessary, marking its borders with guides, and then copy by pressing ctrl + c (or by selecting the "Copy" command (copy) in the menu item "Edit" (Edit)). The selected part of the image will be placed on the clipboard (memory for copied elements) of the computer, and it can be pasted into a file (using the "Paste" command or by pressing the keys ctrl + v), opened either in Photoshop or another graphic or a text editor (for example, it is very convenient to transfer photo elements to a Word file in this way). You do not need to save any changes to the original photo file - it serves only as a material for copying.
In a file opened in Photoshop, a part of the image extracted from another file by copying will be placed as a new layer that can be enlarged, reduced, rotated, transformed in other ways, or moved. If you save the file where the “frame” was placed as a “Photoshop” (psd) file, then you can return to editing all the inserted fragments even after closing the file and the program, since this format involves saving layers.
Thus, cropping in the Photoshop application can be done in several alternative ways, their choice depends on the goals and objectives of this operation and on the personal preferences of the designer.
