How To Crop In Photoshop

Hi, my name is Tom. I'm an edit assistant and a graphic designer. I am now going to show you how to crop images using Photoshop CS4.

Alright, let's get started. First of all, I'm going to find the image that I want to crop, so I'm going to bring up a new window in a snow leopard. So I'm now going to navigate my way through.

So I've stored my picture away in the documents, Videojug, which is obviously what this website is and what you're watching this tutorial on. So as you can see, I have labelled the folder very neatly. So here, I'm going to boot up this picture here, Kanye West performing live at V festival a couple of years ago.

So to do that, I'm going to right click on the image, open with, and select Adobe Photoshop CS4. Now this will allow the photo to be brought up using the software. There he is, in all of his glory.

So this is quite an easy, simple thing for you to do, you just need to come across here to the left where you have the toolbar and select the crop tool. Just clicking on it like that. Right now, there is a couple of ways you can do this, you can just drag it out and move it around, but if you want to be a bit more precise, I like to use the grid which you can get up by pressing apple, apostrophe.

So this had brought a grid up over the image and so you can be quite precise of how far your boarders are around the edge of your picture. Now to zoom in on the image, you press apple and the plus which is by the delete. And you can zoom in or zoom out using the minus.

So you can get as close or as far away to the subject as you see fit, another quick easy tip here is if you hold down the space bar, it brings up the hand tool and you can move around the image, which makes your life a hell of a lot easier when you are doing this. So with the crop tool still selected, I'm just going to start up here in the top, right hand corner. I'm just going to crop Mr.

West out of the background image that we have here. So we can zoom into his hand, again with the hand tool with the space bar, holding it down. I'm just going to move up to his hand.

Now I'm going to start off by selecting the hand. So to do that, you just click and drag on the image, like so and this will now highlight the image that you have selected. Now I mentioned earlier about the grid, what I can now do is I can click in the space you've highlighted and move the area around, so I'm going to place that one grid away from his hand.

I'm going to do that all the way around the image. So that's roughly around one brick away. Now using the handles, you can now select the rest of the image, so you can move them diagonally, you can move them up and down, however you may choose to in this, with whatever image you're using.

So again, I'm just going to, with this handle here move it up one square above his finger which is pointing up there and then again with the space bar, I'm just going to move slightly over to the left, zoom out maybe a little bit again with apple, minus. And then again just dragging the handles to where you see fit and what you want to crop out of the image, so once you've got your image selected, again just by moving the handles up and down, left and right however long you want to. So there we go, if I now zoom out, you can now see that we just have Kanye West selected there.

Now all you need to do now is just hit enter, and that will have cropped the image out. So to remove the grid again, apple apostrophe, and there we go. Now if you suddenly decide that that's not how you wanted to crop it in the first place, you have a little pallet here on the right hand side of Photoshop which is your history.

So what you can do is step back in time from your previous actions and you can go back and re-crop the image if you decided you just wanted to crop his face or if you hadn't cropped it quite properly. Another quick easy tip is apple, Z or control Z if you're on a PC to undo. And you can crop until your