Author Tips Podcast

Cropping in CS4 by Richard Harrington

Hi! My name is Richard Harrington and we are going to take a look at some of the new features in Photoshop CS4. Now, I am going to revisit cropping. There are a couple of new things about cropping in CS4 as well as some stuff that has been there for a while that nobody seems to know.

So let us take a quick look at how to use the Crop Tool to get the results that we need. So I am going ahead here and open up this first image, and let us take that full screen. And this is just shot, a car going down the road here in Los Vegas. We are at Photoshop World so all that noise you are hearing, is the excitement of people learning about the latest version of Photoshop, all the cool new things coming out that are going to make working with digital images more fun and productive.

Now what we are going to do here is crop this image to a specific size. First thing I am going to do is something special. I am going to double click on the layer and name it. So this is no longer a background layer. That is going to come in handy here in a minute.

Next, I am going to grab the Crop Tool. C for crop, and I want you to look up top here in the top of the Options bar, we can go ahead and specify a target size. So I am going to say that I want this to be a three inch by three inch square. I could simply type in three in by three in at 300 pixels per inch. So it is going to crop it to a specific square shape for use in a print project.

So go ahead and just click and drag, and you see that it actually constrains it to a square. And when I am happy, I can go ahead and click the plus box here, the check mark, and it will apply it.

Now before I do that, there is an important option that is going to become available here in CS4. That is nice in case you have a client or need flexibility in the future. Before you click commit on that crop, you want to go ahead and choose hide instead of delete. Normally when you crop, it deletes the pixels and gets rid of them. But if you choose hide, it actually keeps them, does not discard them so you have got them there in the future.

Now that is not new to Photoshop CS4. But it comes in play here in just a second. I am going ahead and click the check box and it applies it, and you see the image is cropped. Because the pixels are hidden and not deleted, we can actually grab the Move Tool and reposition that photo within the frame up to where the original value was.

Now, here is what new to CS4. You have the ability to change your mind and undo the crop. Even after closing and opening the image. Watch! I am going to close the image here and hit save, save that out, that is great, and then let us reopen it, file, open recent, and grab my crop. Now you are saying it is discarded right? Now, all that detail is still there. We can simply choose image, reveal all, and it brings back all of the detail that was there outside of the boundaries of the crop.

So, you can now crop without fear. Crop the image, but make sure the layer is floating, that you have turned it into an actual layer, not a background layer. And while you at it make sure you choose the hide option, not the delete option. That works great in Photoshop CS4.

One more cool thing to show you about cropping and a lot of people do not know about, and that is the perspective crop. We can go ahead and grab the Crop Tool, and crop this image out. Let us go ahead and clear that so it does not constrain the size. And I click and drag, so this is about how I want it to be.

Once you are satisfied with that, go ahead the option up here called perspective. And this allows you to bend the image in. Notice I am just pulling the corner points like a free distort, and we are getting the crop to go up in a line with the edges of the photo.

When I am satisfied I go ahead and press return, and you see that the image no longer has distortion. Now it got a little bit stretched top to bottom and that is easy to fix. Then go ahead and click return, grab free transform, and simply pull that down until it looks normal.

And a