Now, as I say that is the most common way to crop an image. But it is by no means the only way to crop an image inside Photoshop. There are many, many ways. Of which we are going to look at several.

Another way to crop an image is to use the standard rectangular marquee tool up here in the upper left corner of the tool box. And you can get to that tool by clicking on it to select it or by pressing that “M” key for marquee.

Now, the advantage of using the marquee tool to crop is that you can select different portions of the image. For example, I will drag around this area of the image and say that is what I want to keep. And really I want to make sure to keep this guys right here, the central subjects of the photograph. So, I will shift drag around that portion of the image. Pressing the “Shift” key as you drag with the marquee tool adds to a selection. I am going shift drag down here too around my sister’s garish pants. Notice this, I am making sure to stay outside of the black area. So, I do now want to select any of this black because I want to crop within the black area and make sure I get rid of all that black stuff.

And I might shift drag around a few other areas as well but that is pretty much it. I got the portions of the image that I want to make sure and select. So, notice I am just dragging around those areas, shift dragging around some others just to draw multiple selections and even though this is now a non rectangular area. It is a multisided sort of weird non-rectangular area even with the gutter down the middle. I can still crop it by going to the image menu and choosing the crop command. So, the crop command can crop around any shape selection outline. So, anything that you can select and there are other selection tools. There is the lasso, the magic wand; anything that you can select the crop command will crop around. So, I will choose the crop command and there we go. The image is now cropped. Get rid of that selection outline. I will go to the select menu and I will choose “Deselect” or I can press the keyboard equivalent “Command+D” or “Ctrl+D” on the PC.

Now, I will go ahead and just zoom in here a little bit and you can see how nicely cropped this final image is.