In this photo manipulation tutorial, we'll explain how to properly crop images and look at several ways to use the Crop Tool.

For photo editors, this tool is extremely important and necessary, thanks to cropping, the photo takes on a completely different look. We can crop the edges of an image to create a new composition, or we can remove unwanted objects from the frame at the borders of a photo, just as photographers used to cut their photos with guillotine shears after developing.

When should you crop an image?

Very often, due to lack of time, we are forced to neglect the construction of the correct composition in the frame directly during the shooting.

But thanks to Photoshop, we have the opportunity to change the composition after shooting using the Crop Tool or Frame / Crop in the Russian version of the program.

Also, this tool has additional functions designed to teach the basics of composition, such as the Rule of Thirds. We will tell you more about this a little later.

With the help of Crop, we can not only get rid of unnecessary objects in the frame, but also correct very common mistakes. For example, we can correct a horizon littered in a photograph, which is a gross mistake and annoys viewers no less than a picture hanging crookedly on the wall.

We will show you how to use cropping to position the horizon parallel to the top and bottom of the photo.

It is sometimes difficult to prepare pictures for printing when the aspect ratio of the cropped image does not match the aspect ratio of the image that has not been cropped. This problem is especially significant if you want to combine photos into one series.

We'll show you how to use the Crop/Frame tool to crop photos while retaining the shape and proportions of the original photo.

Where is the Crop Tool or Crop Tool?

In the Photoshop Crop Tool, you will find it in the Toolbar in its uppermost compartment, which indicates the frequency of use of this tool.

If you click on the tool's icon and hold down the mouse button, you'll see that it has several sub-sections, such as the Slice Tool, which is typically used by web designers to clip portions of a Photoshop document for web pages. In early versions of the program, Slice Tools occupied a separate niche, but over time they were merged with Crop Tools.

What can I do with the Crop Tool?

Here we'll show you how to use this tool to improve the composition of a photo, correct cluttered horizons, and resize an image for printing.

Improving the composition

Looking through the footage, we choose the most good photos, and as often happens, there are very few such photos. The chances of getting a good shot increase if you use the Rule of Thirds.

According to this compositional technique, the frame is divided into nine equal parts using a grid. By placing subjects in the compartments created by the grid, at the intersection of lines, or along the lines, we significantly improve the composition of the photo.

Professional photographer David Bailey, using the example of a photo of a girl, showed how effectively you can crop a portrait, leaving part of the image outside the frames and cutting off the top of the model’s head, thereby making it more restrained and at the same time intimate.

Get creative with the framing process, use a square frame instead of a standard one, often this option looks more impressive.

Using the crop grid blend mode

1. Draw a square

Open the original image. Select the Crop tool from the toolbar. Hold down the Shift key (this combination makes the crop area square) and select the area you want to keep. The area that will be removed after cropping will be painted in transparent gray, and the untouched fragment of the image will remain 100% visible.

2. Keep balance

In the Options Bar, set the View Mode to Rule of Thirds. Drag the crop square so that the line intersections are positioned over the model's eyes. Next, position the mouse cursor outside the crop square and rotate it to change the angle of the model's head and achieve symmetry.

3. Creative framing

Now drag the crop square to the right to leave it outside its border left side model's face. The result still follows the Rule of Thirds: the eye, nose, and mouth are in the left third, the hair is in the middle third, and there is empty space in the right third.

4. Changing the framing screen settings

The area outside the cropping window is displayed as a gray translucent screen by default, which helps you to focus directly on the fragment that will remain after cropping.

If you want to completely hide the area that will be clipped, you can change its transparency. To do this, in the options panel, set the Opacity to 100% in the Enable Crop Shield section.

You can also choose any color to display the clipped area, or by unchecking Enable Crop Shield, completely disable the crop shield.

Correcting errors by framing

In addition to improving composition, framing also allows you to correct some of the mistakes made when shooting. To capture the entire landscape, we had to zoom out as much as possible, as a result, the edges of the hood fell into the frame. Also in the upper left corner of the photo, we see a darkening that we do not need.

We photographed from a boat, so it was quite difficult to take a photo with a perfect horizon line, the horizon was a little filled up, but fortunately, it is possible to correct such blots with cropping.

Select the Crop Tool in the toolbar, select our photo, set the view mode to Rule of Thirds.

Then hold down the Shift key, in this case this will keep the original aspect ratio of the photo. With the Shift key held down, move the mouse cursor over the upper left corner of the photo and drag it so as to leave the blackout and the hood included in the frame behind the crop area.

Drag the cropping box to place the stone in the bottom left corner of the grid. The mountain must remain in the central part of the grid. To correct a bulging horizon line, position the cursor outside the crop box and rotate it so that the horizon line runs parallel to the horizontal grid lines.

Change of size

Sometimes, when sending a series of photos for printing, we get partially normally printed photos that occupy the entire sheet of photo paper, and partially cropped. We will now introduce you to step by step guide correct and accurate framing.

How to resize a photo?

1. Choose the scale

Open the original image. Select the Crop tool, on the left side of the Options Bar, click on the arrow next to the tool icon and from the presented cropping presets, select 5 inch x 7 inch 300 ppi (5 inches x 7 inches, 300 pixels per inch).

2. Change the orientation of the photo

By default, the preset will create an orientation for a portrait photo, but we need a landscape format. To switch orientation, there is a special button in the options bar in the form of a rounded arrow, you can also change the orientation by pressing the X key on your keyboard.

3. Checking the size

To complete cropping, click on the tool icon and select Crop the Image from the pop-up window. Next, go to Image> Image Size (Image, Image Size). Select inches as the unit of measure. We will see that the image size is 7 inches wide by 5 inches high with a resolution of 300 pixels per inch.

How to use the Crop/Frame tool

Below we have demonstrated the key parameters of the Crop/Box tool. Enjoy all the features of this invaluable tool, and we'll show you everything you need to know about this tool.

• Fast switching. Click on this icon to change the preset image orientation. We can choose landscape or portrait orientation.
• Overlay. To overlay a grid according to the Rule of Thirds, select Rule of Thirds from the list. Or choose another grid that suits you.
• Framing Screen darkens the area that will be cut off during the cropping process. To turn off the screen, uncheck the box.
• Reinstalling a preset. Here you can set a preset for cropping with specific sizes and resolutions.
• Reset. To reset a preset, click on the tool icon in the options bar and select Reset tool
• Opacity and color. Lower the opacity of the Screen to make the area that will be cropped more visible. You can also change the color of the screen here.
• Perspective. When framing architectural photographs, use this option to manually correct perspective.
• neighboring instruments. In the same section with the Crop/Frame tool, there are less functional Cutting tools. To switch between them, use the key combination Shift+C.

Basic tool parameters

With the Crop Tool selected in the toolbar, click on the image and drag the mouse cursor to draw a crop box (01).

Use the Rule of Thirds grid overlay for a more concise composition (02).

By default, the clipping area is highlighted with a gray translucent screen, which sometimes makes it difficult to concentrate on the area we are going to leave, especially if the photo is black and white. In this case, you can change the color and opacity of the screen (03).

To apply a crop to an image, click on the tool icon. Or click on any other tool in the toolbar, then a pop-up window will appear in which the program will ask you if you are going to crop the image or not (04).

framing or Crop- one of the main tools of Adobe Photoshop. composition tool. After all, in fact, the photograph itself is cropping. But even though many of us are familiar with Photoshop for a long time, it often happens that we don't know much about Crop. That is why we propose to study in detail the possibilities of framing in the most popular graphics editor, and tell you about 10 things that every photographer or designer needs to know.

You can watch a video tutorial in which Martin Perhiniak talks in detail about framing in English, or read a text description in Russian.

1. Crop Guide Overlays Mode

In mode Crop There are several options for overlaying the framing grid. You can see them right after you select a tool. Crop, and switch between them by pressing the key O. The following overlay types are available:

– Rule of Thirds (rule of thirds)
– Grid (grid)
– Diagonal (diagonal)
– Triangle (triangle)
– Golden Ratio (Golden Ratio)
– Golden Spiral (Golden Spiral)

All of them help to build a picture according to the composition according to its laws, and make cropping easier. You can also change the position spirals or triangle in case Golden Spiral or Triangle is selected by pressing a key combination Shift+O.

2. Change crop orientation

Probably you have already encountered the fact that it is not so easy to rotate the crop frame you set up in Photoshop. When you want to rotate the frame 90 degrees while keeping the aspect ratio, press the X. This way you can easily switch between landscape and portrait orientations.

3. Hide cropped areas

In order to make it easier to understand how good the frame will look after pressing the Accept button, you can hide the trimmed crop fields by clicking H. This will let you see final result before framing is confirmed. In the settings, there are more options to adjust the crop preview: click on the crop settings icon, where you can change the intensity of the blackout of the cropped area, as well as its color.

4. Classic framing mode

In Photoshop CC, you have probably already encountered the fact that cropping has become different than in previous versions. Namely, the cropping window has become static, and the image itself needs to be moved and adjusted to the grid. For those who prefer to use the classic cropping mode, in which you need to move not the picture itself, but the frame, it is possible to do this by pressing the key P which will take you to Classic Mode. You can also do this in the framing settings menu in the settings panel.

5. Usagefront image

When working with two documents with different resolutions and image sizes, you can easily crop one document to fit the other using the option front image. First you need to open both documents and select the one you want to use as a reference. Next select crop tool, and on the pop-up window in the options bar, select FrontImage or press the key I. This will remember the size and resolution of the first document. Then you can switch to another document in which crop tool will already contain setting the size and resolution of the first image.

6. How can cropping be confirmed

In addition to clicking on the checkmark in the settings panel, there are other options for how you can confirm the crop you have made:

– Press Enter
– Double click on crop area
– Click on the confirm icon in the settings panel
– Right click > Context menu > Crop
– Image setup menu > Crop

7. Perspective Crop Tool

If there is an object with a pronounced perspective in the frame, such as a building, then its planes may not be parallel to the frame frame. In this case, you can use Perspective Crop Tool. To crop, you need to mark four corners, and press Enter after the crop box is formed. The finished frame will be located front to you with even planes. If you want to align an object without cropping, use Auto Upright tab Lens Corrections in settings Camera Raw filter.

8. Reversible crop

The best way to keep the "cut off" parts of the image when cropping is to uncheck the option Delete Cropped Pixels in framing settings. Another way is to create a layer smart object, which you can crop without fear of irreversible consequences, even regardless of whether the checkbox was turned on Delete Cropped Pixels, or not.

9. Pushing boundaries

While most users use cropping to cut off the excess from a photo, some use it to add something to the image by expanding its borders. To do this, you just need to drag the corners of the crop frame outside the picture, and if you have a background layer, pixels of the same color as the background layer will be added to the picture, if not, then the expansion areas will remain transparent.

10. Straighten a photo with cropping

You can also use crop tool to straighten your photos. Just by holding Command/Ctrl, click and drag to draw a line to indicate the horizon of the photo. You can also use any vertical straight lines to straighten the image.

Today you will learn how to make cropping in photoshop. We will be working with the Crop Tool. But first, let's find out what framing is, and why it is needed.

Cropping is the trimming of excess parts of the image that, according to your plan, do not fit into the composition.

For example, this is the original image:

And this is the cropped version:

There are several ways to carry out cropping in photoshop. The most convenient, in my opinion, is the Crop Tool (Cropping)

Open any image

Now select the Crop Tool, hold down the left mouse button to start the selection and release when the selection is complete. A frame like this will appear:

As you probably noticed, the frame has 8 points. By moving them, you edit the area that you want to leave "in the frame":

Anything outside the frame will be cropped. To confirm cropping, press the Enter key:

Here is such a simple tool. For a snack, I'll show you a few more ways to crop in Photoshop.

Cropping with Selection

Another very good method that I sometimes use. Make an arbitrary selection

And now go to Image (Image) -\u003e Crop (Crop). That's it, framing done! 🙂

You can also copy the image (Ctrl + V) with active selection, then create a new document (Ctrl + N), which will already be the desired size. And then just paste the copied image (Ctrl + V).

Trimming

This is the last cropping method that we will look at today.

Trimming works on the principle of removing unnecessary pixels. Those. if there are transparent areas around the edges of the image, trimming will cut them off.

Trimming is called in the menu Image (Image) -> Trim (Trimming):

The Based on parameter specifies on the basis of which the image will be cropped: Transparent Pixels (Transparent pixels), Top Left Pixel Color (Color of the upper left pixel), Bottom Right Pixel Color (Color of the lower right pixel).

Trim Away determines which side will be trimmed. If all checkboxes are checked, trimming will be performed from all sides.

This concludes the tutorial on cropping in Photoshop. Leave your comments 🙂 I say goodbye to you until the next meeting (which will be very soon :)) on the pages of the site

In a few lessons, I'll show you the simplest techniques for working with Photoshop. Preparation of photographs for printing, for placement on the Internet. These lessons show the most necessary actions, without which to prepare good photo, is simply impossible. The tools that I show are in all versions of Photoshop. If you don't have the same version as mine, some of the tools may be in a different place, but they are!

Lesson #1

Attention! Always make, just in case, a copy of the photo and then "mock" it already! Because the original may come in handy when you are not satisfied with the result of your experiments.

Now open a copy of the photo in Photoshop. Press the button " crop"(1) or "Crop" if you have non-Russian Photoshop.

At the top of the properties panel, set the desired width and height of the image. Since we are preparing a picture for posting on the Internet, in order to maintain the proportions of the monitor screen, we will set, for example, the width to 1024 pixels and the height to 768 pixels.

In principle, here you can set any size. Simply, if you want the photo to be used as desktop wallpaper, then set it to 1920x1080, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 800x600.
If the photo does not "pull" on the wallpaper, or there are several photos on the page, then they need to be made smaller in size, otherwise site visitors may not wait for such a heavy page to load and go to another site.

By the way, I am often asked how to make an avatar for a forum. And you do the same! Usually the maximum size of an avatar is 90x90. Therefore, set Width to 90 pixels, Height to 90 pixels.

After pressing the "Crop" button, the cursor took the form of the "Crop" icon. Now, by pressing the left mouse button in the upper left corner of the photo, drag the cursor down and to the right. In this case, the frame will stretch behind it. Release the button and the frame will freeze in place. But you can stretch - squeeze it by the corners, take it with the cursor and drag the entire frame from place to place. At the same time, it will strictly observe the proportion you set, so you will not be able to flatten the photo. In any case, the size you set will be saved!

By the way, if you are not going to observe the proportion of the photo size, then leave the "width" and "height" fields empty. In this case, by dragging the frame with the cursor by the sides, you can make it wide or narrow, high or low. In short, the photo will be a non-standard size.

As a result of experiments, you will achieve a result when there is nothing superfluous left in the frame, and the future cropping area is darkened.

Now press the right mouse button while holding the cursor on the photo. A context menu will appear with the words "crop" and "cancel" Press the menu item "crop" and you have an improved quality photo!

Note: Now you can proceed to the step of saving the photo. In the future, when you gain experience, you can do all the steps to improve the photo (next pages of the book) and only then save it.

Today the topic will be for beginners, although it is likely that those who have been communicating with Photoshop for a long time will find something new for themselves. Let's talk about cropping a photo using Adobe Photoshop, or rather, about the Crop Tool.

Many people prefer to crop photos in a RAW converter, which is often very convenient, especially at the stage of parsing a photoset and selecting those SAME, several photos for subsequent deep retouching. However, I personally think that framing is often much more convenient and expedient at the very end of processing, because you don’t always know in advance what color or contrast accents may appear in the composition, and, in the end, sometimes the model’s legs are a little simpler " pull up" than to somehow change the framing.

1) So, the Crop Tool is located on the Adobe Photoshop toolbar, indicated by the number one in the figure and responds to the "C" key.

2) Width and Height - if we want to crop the image with a strictly defined size, we can enter these values ​​for the width and height, respectively, and, if desired, swap them by clicking on the arrows between them.

3) If you right-click on one of the Width or Height fields, you can select the units for our numbers. Please note that at least some number must already be entered into the cell, otherwise Windows will simply offer its standard copy / paste dialog, etc.

4) Resolution - if we want to set the resolution for our future frame, it can be set here. In my opinion, the moment is rather conditional, because. in most cases, ultimately, we are only interested in the actual resolution of the image in pixels, regardless of its further application.

5) If we need to crop several photos strictly to the same size, then for convenience, just click on the "Front Image" button, and Photoshop will automatically enter the values ​​​​in the Width and Height fields corresponding to the file we are currently looking at.

6) The "Clear" button resets the values ​​of all the above fields.

Now let's move on to the more interesting and more practical part.

When we start actually cropping and stretching the "crop-frame", the menu changes slightly and this is what happens ...

7) We have the opportunity to choose whether to leave the cut off part of the frame in memory (Hide), or delete it tightly (Delete). In most cases, I find it's preferable to always select Hide, because it's very often convenient to just move the photo a little bit in an already cropped area instead of going back and re-cropping.

It should be noted that the choice is provided only when working with a layer, when working with a background image (Background), the Delete option is always selected (To easily and quickly make a layer from a background image, just double-click on the inscription "background" in the panel with layers at the bottom right ).

An example of cropping an already cropped photo, with the Hide option selected:

8) AT latest versions Photoshop has the ability to include "help" when cropping. Specifically, you can choose between three options, which, when selected, are projected into the cropping area: Rule of Thirds - the "rule of thirds" grid, Grid - just a grid (it can be useful, for example, when leveling the horizon), None - nothing is projected.

9) The Sield checkbox determines whether it is necessary to "darken" an inactive area that will not subsequently enter the frame. Nearby in the Color field, you can select the color of "dimming".

10) "Opacity" (Opacity) shows the percentage of darkening in percent (0 - completely transparent, 100 - completely opaque).

11) Perspecitve determines whether we will "correct" perspective distortion. (Becomes active only when the Delete option is selected in step 7).

12 ) Cancel and OK, respectively Esc and Enter on the keyboard.

13) Axis of rotation of the frame or the center of resizing of the cropped area. It can be dragged with the mouse to any place, even outside the frame and outside the photo, or you can Alt-click in Right place to show up there right away.

By the way, to rotate the frame, it is enough to move the mouse pointer to its edge, then it [pointer] will change to an arrow and it will be possible to rotate the cropped area. If we want to rotate it by an exact multiple of 15 degrees, it's enough to hold Shift while rotating (it's often handy when rotating 90 and 180 degrees).

Example:

14) To crop while maintaining aspect ratio, it is enough to first select the entire photo with the Crop Tool, and then drag one of the corners while holding the Shift key.

And to crop keeping the aspect ratio, but already to the center of the axis of rotation(13a) you also need to select the entire photo with the Crop Tool, and also drag one of the corners, but already holding Alt + Shift.

It is also sometimes useful to put the axis of rotation in the center of one of the sides of the frame, if you don’t want to crop it from this side, but you want to crop it from the rest without changing the aspect ratio - try it.

9a is an example of a "helper" grid with the Grid option selected changing the "help" when cropping.

By the way, to crop with a square, you need to hold down Shift before selecting the cropping area. And to simply stretch/shrink the crop area to (from) the center of the crop area (axis of rotation) - drag one of the center points on the sides of the frame while holding Alt.

It all sounds scary and tricky, but in practice it will turn out to be very simple and convenient, try it))

15) And finally, about perspective distortions. Suppose we need to align something shot in perspective. There are several ways to do this in Photoshop, we will look at the easiest one, which is available in the context of cropping and the Crop Tool.

Suppose we have a window like this, and we want to "straighten" it as if we were looking at it from the front. The picture was found by me in Google, so if someone's copyright has been violated, I apologize in advance))

In 7a we select the Delete option, then in the Perspective box it will be possible to tick 11a. Now the points along the edges of the cropping area can be easily moved one relative to the other by simply dragging the mouse. Let's set them so that the border lines of the cropping area are parallel to the corresponding lines in the photo (this is where it will be very useful to select Grid in the "help" menu when cropping 8).

If one of the points is close to the frame boundary, it [the point] will try to "stick" to the frame boundary. To prevent this from happening, for precise positioning, hold Ctrl.

When we have everything successfully positioned, we press Enter and as a result we get:

I want to note that the more accurately we positioned the points relative to the geometric guides of the image, the more accurate the correction result will be, however, in any case, with strong perspective distortions, the image quality will also suffer greatly, which is especially noticeable at low resolution of the original.

Traditionally, an example of a larger picture and, perhaps, that's all for today.))