Cropping images is by far one of the most common, every day uses for
Photoshop. It's so common that Photoshop comes with a tool designed
specifically for cropping photos, conveniently named the Crop Tool. One
of the great things about the Crop Tool is that you can easily crop your
photos to common photo sizes like 4x6, 5x7 or 8x10 simply by entering
the width and height values into the Options Bar before dragging out
your cropping border, or by selecting a preset crop size from the Preset
picker.
That may be great, but what if you don't want to change the aspect
ratio of the photo? What if you want to crop the image while keeping the
width-to-height ratio the same as the original? And what if you're not
sure what the original aspect ratio actually is? You could open
the Image Size dialog box to find out the width and height of the image
and then do the math, but there's an even easier way thanks to a rarely
used but very useful command in Photoshop called Transform Selection, which is what we're going to be looking at in this tutorial.
Here's the photo I'll be working with. I want to crop the image more
closely around the woman's face and the flowers she's holding, but I
want the final result to maintain the same aspect ratio as the original:
The original photo.
Let's get started!
Step 1: Select The Entire Photo
The first thing we need to do is select our entire photo. Go up to the Select menu at the top of the screen and choose All at the very top of the list, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+A (Win) / Command+A
(Mac). Either way selects the entire photo, and you'll see a selection
outline appear around the edges of the image in the document window:
A selection outline appears around the entire photo in the document window.
Step 2: Choose "Transform Selection" From The Select Menu
With a selection outline now around the entire photo, go back up to the Select menu once again and this time choose Transform Selection near the bottom of the list:
Go to Select > Transform Selection.
Step 3: Resize The Selection
As its name implies, Photoshop's Transform Selection command allows
us to make changes to the selection outline itself without affecting
anything inside of the selection. In this case, we want to resize the
selection outline and make it smaller until it surrounds only the part
of the photo that we want to keep, allowing us to crop away everything
else. To resize the selection, hold down your Shift
key, then click on any of the handles (the little squares) in the
corners of the selection and drag the corner inward. Holding the Shift
key down forces the width-to-height aspect ratio of the selection to
remain the same as you drag, which is what allows us to maintain the
same aspect ratio as the original photo.
You can move the selection outline as well by clicking anywhere
inside of the selection and dragging it to a new location. Just don't
click on that little target symbol in the center of the selection,
otherwise you'll move the target symbol, not the selection. Continue
moving and resizing the selection as needed until it's surrounding only
the area you want to keep:
Hold Shift and drag any of the corner handles inward to resize the selection outline while keeping the aspect ratio the same.
When you're done, press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to accept the transformation.
Step 4: Crop The Image
At this point, all that's left to do is crop away the area outside of our selection! For that, we can use Photoshop's Crop command. Go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen and choose Crop:
Go to Image > Crop.
As soon as you select Crop, Photoshop goes ahead and crops away
everything that falls outside of the selection, leaving us with a
cropped version of the photo that maintains the exact same aspect ratio
as the original:
The aspect ratio of the cropped image remains the same as the original photo.
To remove the selection outline, either go back up to the Select menu and choose Deselect or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+D (Win) / Command+D (Mac).
No comments:
Post a Comment