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Day 10: Cropping (Straightening)

Lesson 21 from: 30 Days of Photoshop

Dave Cross

Day 10: Cropping (Straightening)

Lesson 21 from: 30 Days of Photoshop

Dave Cross

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Lesson Info

21. Day 10: Cropping (Straightening)

Next Lesson: Day 11: Adjusting

Lessons

Class Trailer

Day 1

1

Class Introduction

19:04
2

Overview of Days 1-15

54:32
3

Overview of Days 16-30

1:11:53
4

Preview of Content, Part 1 - Layers, Comps, Styles, Masks

49:10
5

Preview of Content, Part 2 - Smart Objects and Paths

30:33

Day 2

6

Day 1 Introduction

13:31
7

Day 1 Exploring Photoshop

16:51
8

Day 1 Realistic Expectations

27:26

Day 3

9

Day 2: Best Practices I Part One

33:28
10

Day 2 Best Practices I Part 2

25:59

Day 4

11

Day 3: Lay of the Land

55:16

Day 5

12

Day 4: Best Practices II – Working Non-Destructively

47:57

Day 6

13

Day 5: Layers I

58:50

Day 7

14

Day 6: Layers II

44:51

Day 8

15

Day 7: Layers III - Masks

1:01:47
16

Bonus Video: "Layers"

09:05
17

Bonus Video: "Vector Masks"

05:54

Day 9

18

Day 8: Getting Images In and Out

55:51

Day 10

19

Day 9: Resolution, File Size, Resizing

1:00:42
20

Bonus Video: "Free Transform - Warping"

07:54

Day 11

21

Day 10: Cropping (Straightening)

49:38

Day 12

22

Day 11: Adjusting

56:22

Day 13

23

Day 12: Smart Objects & Smart Filters I (Introduction)

48:52
24

Bonus Video: "Copying Smart Filters"

02:11

Day 14

25

Day 13: Smart Objects & Smart Filters II (More Advanced)

56:34

Day 15

26

Day 14: Retouching I (Replacing, Removing, Moving)

55:10

Day 16

27

Day 15: Retouching II (Fixing, Portrait Retouching)

1:01:28

Day 17

28

Day 16: Quiz & Review

53:05

Day 18

29

Day 17: Shapes, Paths, and Patterns

49:56

Day 19

30

Day 18: Selecting I

1:05:47

Day 20

31

Day 19: Selecting II (Compositing)

1:02:01
32

Bonus Video: "Green Screen"

08:21

Day 21

33

Day 20: Type

1:03:45

Day 22

34

Day 21: Color

54:54

Day 23

35

Day 22: Painting & Brush Options

59:15

Day 24

36

Day 23: Automation I (Built-In, Not So Obvious)

58:04

Day 25

37

Day 24: Automation II (Actions)

1:00:05
38

Bonus Video: "Actions"

04:20

Day 26

39

Day 25: Presets

53:47

Day 27

40

Day 26: Video

1:03:01

Day 28

41

Day 27: Finishing Touches

1:05:08
42

Bonus Video: "Sharpen"

16:26

Day 29

43

Day 28: Tips and Tricks

52:22

Day 30

44

Day 29: Quiz, Review, Projects

1:01:30

Day 31

45

Day 30: Project, Strategies to Continue to Get Better

48:41

Lesson Info

Day 10: Cropping (Straightening)

well yesterday we talked about image size and how important is when you're re sizing the overall image when you want to make keep the same pixels in the image but make it bigger or smaller that's what image sized us today we're gonna talk about something similar but frankly quite different and that's cropping and cropping means removing part of the image or actually take pixels away either permanently or hopefully in some cases in a nondestructive way so one of the options we have now as of the last couple of versions of photo shop and through camera is non destructive cropping now honestly that's a term I never thought I would even have said up until recently because cropping was a very destructive things both destructive is a gun because once you cropped and saved that was your new image and information was thrown away but thanks to changes to both the crop tool and also the ability to crop in camera raw we now have a much more at least the option of being non destructive now like ma...

ny things will depend on the situation if you are taking a photograph of when you look through the viewfinder you like the composition of something but then when you open it in photo shop you realize you could have been a little tighter there would might not be any reason to preserve the original information especially if you realize there's a tree on the side that's kind of distracting then you may just decide to just crop it and save it and move on from there however especially if you shoot raw you're going to still keep it original anyways he always have that backup even if you're opening a copy from raw ending up in jail pay at least that raw has that option we're gonna talk about the two different ways to do things and then some of the loss of different ways we can take advantage of cropping cropping does really one main thing and as a little sight bonus something else the main thing is removing information the site bonuses can also straighten things a bit and potentially could even add more campus information if we need it so let's take a look look at this example now actually before we take a look sorry had this I do want to add that there has been a significant change as a photo shop cs six so if you've been using an older version previous to that and now either involve autopsy a six or c c you will notice some significant changes to the way that the crop to works because in the past there was a very specific way that it worked and a lot of people when cia six came up with the new improved crop tool frankly weren't all that happy with the way it operated but I think that's because it was just different because honestly once you get used to it I think the way that the crop cool works now makes better sense it's more intuitive and you get a much more visual preview than you used to in the past so if you're brand new to the crop tool there is a way in photo shop see essex or see see the you can kind of returned to what they call a classic mode which is the way it used to work I would strongly recommend you resist the temptation to enable that and stick with the way the crop tool works even at first you find it frustrating and different I am so much happier now that the crop tool now then the way it used to be because honestly in the past the crop tool used to take a bit of imagination to kind of hope you could imagine what you were going to get when you cropped it now it's very very vision so let's take a look here first important differences when I click on the crop tool in the past I would have had to click and drag to indicate an area that I wanted to crop here the crop handles air already on if I wantto crop it I could just drag the handle and you'll see now it's showing me the crop area but I'm gonna escape out of that for a second before we talk about that let's look at this very important option up in the options bar which is delete cropped pixels up until the last couple versions photoshopped this was a lot more hidden there was a way to do it but it was really a lot more challenging even though this came in as a lock background layer assumes I click on the crop tool in a effect it's unlocked it and now I have this option so if I were to drag this and say this is the way I want this new image to look and I committed by either pressing the check mark or hitting enter or return if I were to say this and close it that would be my new photograph the other pixels would be gone so the image size would be different but also more importantly I've removed information from this image so if we undo that by unchecked this this is the way we can do nondestructive cropping aiken still click and drag if I want to say this is the area I want I get this nice preview which we'll talk about all those options later but this time when I committed the differences even though I could close and save this that information is still there because it's not deleted and the way we get it back is if you later on realized maybe I should not have cropped this I go to the image menu to reveal all and then it will bring back all the information that was cropped now that's on ly an option if you have this turnoff so like a lot of things in photos off you just have to decide should I have this checked or not and the decision will be based on the likelihood you want to change your mind it's that's a personal preference I will come back and talk about a lot of these other things but let's look at the other way that we can do non destructive cropping and that's through camera wrong so first of all I need to reset this just to show you what it normally looks like okay so here's my camera off I'll open it in raw in camera and there's sense of options for the crop to weaken just do normal which means click and drag any shape you want or certain ratios so if you know you want to fit in eight by ten you could do a four by five ratio and so on were not going to go through all the options and here right the moment the main thing I want to show you in here is if I click and drag to say I want a crop like this I still have an eye leave this on all the time this option called open object which is this one we talked about and we'll continue to talk about opening photoshopped as smart object so now I hit open object it comes into photoshopping appears as though that information is gone but really it's just this is the version that I've opened if we switched back to bridge for a second you see even the preview updates to show me something has changed but the indicator is this little crop symbol means you're viewing the last way you left this raw file which is with this crop in place but thankfully we can get it back get that information back so if I I have this image here and I'm working on I could even do things to it in photo shop but just for the sake of argument I'll show you that I look at the sun logo and maybe I didn't really want to crop that after all I double click to go back to camera raw as soon as I click on the crop tool it shows me well here's the crop you have so by nature the camera raw method of cropping is non destructive I didn't have to do anything to say reveal all all I'm doing is telling it show me what you've got and I can then go back to this menu and just choose clear the crop now I click okay now what's gonna happen at first it might look like nothing has happened but what it's really done is revealed all those pixels but because the canvas size that was working on was this size now once again I have to go back to image and shoes reveal all and now I see the rest of my photograph so two different choices there the crop tool has the option within for a shop too delete crop pixels or not camera wrought by nature is a nondestructive crops so that gives you bold choices and again you might not always want to crop something every time you don't always end as much as I and pushed for working non destructively honestly there'll be times when you just don't need to again if you take that photograph and realize there's information on the side that is kind of distracting and you just never want to see it again you crop it save it as a j peg and you're good to go knowing that that raw file is in the background keeping that original as shop photo and that's one of the again the benefits of raw is that you can't overwrite the original like you can with j picks so here let's look through some of the things now I mentioned in an earlier lesson I'll keep stressing this soon as I click on a tool my eyes go up to the options bar to see is there anything that I need to change in terms of settings and in here there's a few like this this bunch of different overlays which means as soon as I stopped start to crop I'll get an overlay that will help me so for example right now it's set to grid so as soon as I start to drag you see this grid shows up and that can help for things like straightening I can also choose that I want rule of thirds off I'm tryingto use the rule of thirds in my composition too decide where should I have important information like the line of horizon or something like that and there's all these different ones and you can even cycle through them by pressing the letter o if it helps to have these different grids or you could just choose not to have a good at all of course but I find especially if you're trying to straighten something having the grid on their khun b quite useful so that's what these options under this menu is all about this is where we have overall settings and here's this one don't use it please please please don't use it on just kidding office you can't but use classic mode means go back to the way photoshopped dropped who used to work and I personally I I find that not a cz useful anymore auto center preview means when I'm cropping it's always see how it's moving the photograph around inside my crop kerry which actually is again different than it used to be used to be you would drag the crop and then have to reposition the crop area but here you can actually move the photograph around too so decide where you want it to go so again once you get used to this new idea I think this makes a lot better sense to say this is my crop I'm kind of dimming the outside area to help me figure out what's going on and what the area and as I make any adjustment it's gonna redo that little preview kind of overlay idea and this is where is concerned it's actually called the crop shield and you have different options you khun right now it's matching my canvas color I could also go in and I said I really wanted to be black or anything you want let's put back teo grayish color and what opacity is and what that means is if you don't have that on then you see the crop handles and there's no difference of the photograph personally I like having this shield on because it helps me kind of preview what the crop photograph will look like some people like to put this all the way up two one hundred percent opacity so they're not seeing anything of the original photograph I liketo have mine some were almost like kind of seeing it but it helps me picture the result that I'm getting so like a lot of tools settings these ones will stay the way that you leave them so if you decide this is what you the way you want him to use these options it will stay that way until you tell us otherwise so we have lots of options here do you want to show the outside area or not all that kind of stuff personally I haven't set like this and again you have it's not nothing is crop until you either confirm it or cancel it now even in the middle of doing this at this point I can still be right in the middle of cropping and sand gonna crop it this way and still decide who I want to delete or not so that's an ongoing choice that you have if you decide that you're the middle of cropping and you just want to forget it and start over again you have a couple of choices you could click this cancel button or press the escape key on your keyboard either way it will escape out we're still in the crop tool and it still has handles here ready to be cropped but it's letting us start over again so if we want to make new adjustments to how we crop now we'll come back to the crop tool in a second but I want to talk about a couple of things first and that is crop whenever you crop in photoshopped ultimately it's still going always crop to a rectangular image and what I mean by that is let's say that I make some weird shape of a selection in here and I let's feather that edge of my selection so I have a really soft head selection I'm going to duplicate that command control j and then hide the background now if I say well cost what I'd really like to do is crop it to that shapes all I see is that that's not gonna happen because I make this into a selection even though I've got a selection now there is a command that will talk about as we go here under image called crop but you'll see it'll crop as closely as it can based on the fact that this has soft edges so even though in my mind I'm thinking I want to crop this to a shape it won't happen is going to always be rectangular even if some of that rectangle has to be transparent pixels let me do that a different way just so you could see it another way this time we'll just make an oval selection and go to the image menu and shoes crop and it says well I will crop it as tightly as I can to the oval so it's always gonna be a rectangle now if you chose to make these areas see through and save isa png file or something that would be different for a cropping perspective it's always going to crop it based on the rectangle that's just big enough to encompass whatever shape you've had so as an example I can't honestly say I've done this all that often but one theory would be to say I wantto cropping to this area and down to this area and I just made two selections so now when I go to crop it's going to crop it again within those two areas that I selected so plenty of ways to do it this way crop command under the image menu is based on having a selection so some people who for whatever reason they just don't go to the crop to this works too that's completely up to you with one important difference and that is you can make a selection and then use the command transformed selection to decide what area you want to crop it enter to finalize the selection and then go to image crop but you notice in here there is no option that says whether to delete the pixels or not so this by nature is a permanent crop there's no option like there is in the crop too so that's where this one the main differences of you would only use this command if you really were so certain that you wanted to delete the pixels of the crop tool is the only one that has this delete crop pixels option in it otherwise let's say for the sake of argument that we're going to make a new document and bring something into it and I'm going to transform this layer down so there's some area around the outside and I'm gonna hide the background later so you can see right now I have that layer transparency well let's assume for a moment that I having done that now what I really want to do is I crop it so that I see just the photograph well instead of having to go to any effort of selecting it or using the crop tool one of the nice features that photo shop has if you have a situation like this where there's extra information it could be transparent it could be white will see these examples in a second you're the image menu and choose trim now knows how crop is great out because I don't have a selection so I go to trim and says how would you like to trim this and I say based on the transparent pixels trim away top bottom left right so like like okay now automatically crops it to that size by undo that and if I have the background showing then I could do the same thing image trim but in this case it's automatically assuming because it doesn't see any transparent pixels I want to base it on the top left pixel color which in this case would be white and I'm like okay it removes everything this is very useful for situations where maybe you are working on a project this and you have files that are different sizes or you scan something in and there's a bit of a white board around the outside rather go to any effort to crop it yourself the trim command will do it automatically and you have those three choices trim based on transparency based on the top left pixel or a specific color so if it was on red background you could sample that color of red and say trim that now don't be surprised if you use the trim command you see just a tiny hair fringe of a border because sometimes it's so pixel specific and might miss by a little bit just based on a slate color difference it doesn't happen much with transparency so you always have the option of even back here in this case I could say well just to be sure I'm gonna take the crop tool and just move the handles myself and make them line up with my image and then prop it that way and this has the added bonus where again I have the delete crop pixels option or not so that's always another choice of any time three different multiple different options as to how you do the actual cropping now when you have let's close this and just go back to our original image this one here so I open this photo the first thing I would do is go to image size we talked about the last class to see what I have to work with is telling me it's nine by six two hundred it's a six point two one megabyte file just wanted to know what that was so six bass with six point two megabytes if I do decide to take my crop tool and I decide that I'm going crop it toe look more like this and I hit enter now if I go back to the image size it's smaller because I've thrown away information so this point now I could go on do it the things we talked about in the last class about working with dimensions and all that kind of stuff but we're doing it on top of cropping so it's important to note that when you crop something you're still ultimately affecting the image size but you're not just keeping it in the same proportions you're actually those numbers will change what was twelve eighty by seven twenty now it might be a thousand by six hundred because we've taking that crop tool and determined this is the area that I want to keep so when you hit enter it we'll both change the overall dimensions of the image and also throw away some pixel information so that's where cropping kind of fits into the bill now like a lot of tools let's revert this for a second the crop tool has options in the offense bar that are important to look at if I pop up this little choice here is all the different options and again this is been changed that photo shop see essex and cc and earlier version there weren't as many options but here for example if you know I want to crop it to a square then you pick that ratio it's not goingto specify a particular size what is going to say no matter how you drag the handle's it's going to keep it in a ratio of one to one and you see it's automatically made it square here but now if I drag a corner handle even though I'm trying to it can't do anything except crop to a square so once I say I think that's the size I want then I can move the image around inside that and once again I won't keep saying this but just to make sure we remember delete crop pixels or not he had enter to tell it ok that's the way I want to be now just a reminder that when you use any setting under the in the options bar including this one it means from now on it will always stay at a one to one ratio so if I go out and try and drag a rectangle it won't let me because it's still that constraint is still there of a one to one square so I'd have to escape out of there and change this setting back to either a regular ratio and just delete these numbers and that means it's up to me or I could say I want to keep the original ratio of this image so whatever ratio this was if this was eight by ten it's not saves eight by twelve then it will keep that proportion I don't have to hold on the keys I'm just telling it I still want to be this same ratio so would end up being saying eight by ten but I want to determine what area of the image I want to keep so that's what original ratio allows me to do so again each of these cases you can go back ahead of time and pick the ratio now all I've been doing up until this point is just changing the numbers of the dimensions I'm not worried about things like resolution so when we talk about image size we mention about where resolution comes in for things like printing and all that kind of stuff I would suggest that for the most part use the crop tool just as a visual to say this is the area that I want while it is possible is we'll see to say I need to crop it to an eight by ten at this resolution that can have an influence on how your image actually looks so personally my preference would be this I would say all right I want to do the same ratio hit enter and then go to our image size command to see how we're looking in terms of the numbers in here now it is he said it is possible with the crop tool to come in and say no I want a four by five at three hundred pixels per inch and when I do that it's going to change the numbers a little bit so let's take a look at this first of all let's goto image size and it's saying nine by six at two hundred six point two one megabytes okay now we go to this crop tool and when you say all right let's we want this area and as soon as I hit enter now we'll see what it says and it's in fact is saying four by five and three hundred and the file size has gone down a little bit because it was originally a bigger file so that's okay because I'm still cropping down where we ran into the problem is when people say I want any half by eleven at three hundred and they look at their image and kind of go okay let's think about this for a second this image wass a four by five three hundred now I'm telling it to be eaten by eleven and three hundred so this is the same brings up the same discussion we had with tangled image sizes this is going to have to artificially increase everything because I can't just say it just because I have a crop to a preset doesn't mean somehow it's gonna magically make it the right size without something happening so when I commit this and go to image size now you see it's gone up dramatically in size and this is where I start to lose some quality so even though those crop tool presets there are some that just say oh look there's one that's eight by ten and three hundred rate by eleven or three hundred whatever it is the same rule applies you still have tohave mohr information than that or else it will have to interpret late it up and you'll loose and quality so that's the main reason why I tend to still use the same approach we talked about in the last session make sure your original image sizes bigger than you need and then you can always decide I'm going to crop it to this area and then look at the numbers and image size to make sure it still fits within your needs if you rely on the crop tool to change that for you you can run into this situation where it's artificially had to inflate the numbers and the quality will suffer a little bit now if you are going through here this is the just a little menu of choices there's also ah hole option of making your own tool presets where you khun decide different setting so that's another option even on top of these other ones if you're let's I've been doing so many things let's make sure we revert this back again so let's say for the sake of argument that I'm going to say a four by five ratio now when I first did that it's doing with the four height the five so it's making a tall image I can also just so you know what I like it the other way around just hit this little button and it swaps it so now I'm doing an eight by ten one of things that's important to note also we talked about cropping is the camera when you take a photo with digital cameras today the ratio out of the camera is eight by twelve so it's not by nature an eight by ten and a lot of people frankly learned this the hard way because they take a shot and they love the way it looks and then they say only department eight by ten they suddenly realised I had to cut something off each end or a total of two inches because it's not in the same ratio and as hot as it is to say this all cameras are capturing an eight by twelve but go inside a store that sells frames and try and find an eight by twelve frame I'll bet you it's pretty difficult they tend to have eight by ten I didn't have by eleven but not that many eight by twelve even though that's the number that the camera generates so most labs and places that do prints a lot of them at least now we're starting to have both an eight by ten and eight by twelve so you can decide if you're printing on your own inkjet printers eight by ten this is exactly what you have to do is say well it came in as an eight by twelve what area do I wish to remove from the crop to get the result that I want and I think I'm gonna buy in this case I might go this way because I wanted to not be dead center I want it to be a little more interesting compositionally so that's an option we have is is it's a four by five ratio which is when you do the math it's still eight by ten so I would hit enter then I'd look att image size and say what do I have here what's not exactly an eight by ten yet so I do the same thing I did before image size I put in ten now it's an eight by ten and saying based on this I've got a resolution of one fifty is that enough maybe maybe not but that's that's kind of the process you have to go through is to crop it to the right size and then see what that gives you an image size and if necessary tweak a little bit now the other thing that the crop tool does which is kind of interesting is we haven't really talked about this command called canvas size but campus eyes is just confirming our canvass that this photo is appearing on is seven point five by six point two five if you decide for example maybe I want to I have white border around this whole image one of the ways of doing it would be to go to the canvas size command and say relative I want point seven five inches on the top or the width and the height and relative means I'll do the math for you anchor the photograph in the middle and add this around the outside at first it's not gonna be white because it's on an unlocked background we'll get to that in a second now one of the challenges that I got myself into in this case is because I did not choose delete crop pixels when I expanded the canvas area we're seeing more of our photograph so let's go back a couple of steps and say we're going to do our four by five ratio something like this in this case I am going to choose delete crop pixels and hit enter all right so now we go to canvass eyes still got relative on their soul two point seven five each of them the photograph is anchored by the centre quick okay and now you see it has white around the outside so why did it go white this time and transparent the first time well the reason is when you choose delete crop pixels that's your new size so any campus you add gets at in your background color if you did not have the crop pixels which is what I have the first case it the background layer has been unlocked so then when you add more campus by default it's transparent now even if it was transparent of course and white underneath that later on but this is what happens when you crop with deleting the pixels so now let's say I want to add a little bit more room on the bottom so I would click on the top and I'm going to say let's add another point five to the height but knows how I clicked on the top that's going to tell a photo shop on ly add extra campus on the bottom so now I have this nice white border around the outside now by undo a few times here's an interesting fact about the crop tool I'm going toe clear all this information out of here too so I can do whatever I want normally of course we use the crop tool to crop into the image but in this case I want to say you know what I need some extra room toe work so if I drag this out and then drag this down you see I'm getting the same effect of a white border but it's more visual it's me dragging and saying this is where I want and hit enter so the crop tool this is not an everyday use of the prop table but it's an interesting way of all you wanna do is add a bit more canvas to your image either toe add a border or to do something retouching kind of function or something like that taking the crop tool in stretching and outside of the original campus area will automatically make that canvas eyes a little bigger for so just makes life a little simpler now what do we do if we have a photograph that's a little crooked let's open this raw file first in camera raw and see how raw deals with it and this will actually give you an idea if you haven't seen what the crop to look like before csx this is kind of what the crop will use to look like so here's the straightened tool and I decide I want this to be straight so I'm gonna click and drag along a line to say this is what I would like you to straighten when it does what what happens is it pops the crop handles on here but they're currently still crooked so you won't actually see the photograph straighten until you open it in photo shop and it's showing you this is the best I can do because if I go any further there won't be any pixel information there so when I hit open image now it opens that as a straightened image cropped automatically so that's what happens if you crop and straighten in camera off and of course it is a nondestructive as we saw before I could always go back to the crop tool and tell it to clear that completely okay and then choose reveal all now what about in photo shop but if I wanted to straighten this in photo shop while in the crop tool soon as I click on one of the options is a straight up tool and this one is actually I like a lot better now it makes better sense as a tip I would suggest to you personally I find it easier if I make a line that's much longer than I need and that allows me to do very kind of finite adjustments if your line is too short it's a lot harder and the difference is see what happened this case the photograph actually rotated on the fly so instead of in camera raul where it rotated the crop handles that to click okay to see if I liked it here it does this on the fly and if I move my mouth just outside you see I get this little kind of rotation handle and I can actually adjust the image so now as I'm cropping and rotating is actually showing me the crop handles air straight the photograph is rotating and that's quite different than previous versions of photo shop where you have to a lot of guesswork because when you went to rotate something you would only rotate the crops lt's so this is where this grid becomes really useful let's escape out of here for a second and say I just want to do it without using that straightened tool as soon as I start to drag I'm seeing that grid overlay and I'm lining it up with the part I want to be straight and you'll see with our preview now it's showing me that's had to rotate the image slightly to get kind of the effect that I want and once again I would hit enter and now I've got the result that I want so this method is I find it a lot easier and here's what used that I would see happen all the time and previous versions of photo shop people would have my name is that was slightly crooked and the process of trying to straighten it was kind of clumsy or if they went to try and straighten with the crop tool again they have to use their imaginations a little bit to say I hope this looks good once I actually hit the crop button to say go ahead here as you see it's much more visual you khun drag and use that grid overly say right about there is where I want it enter and then it crops same rule applies delete crop taxes or not that never changes even if you're rotating something slightly so that's rotating the overall image the other option that we have is for situations where you want to straighten a layer itself so I'm going to take this image and then we're gonna place another one on top of it just a smaller file okay so as we get a little closer you can see that within this image the image itself isn't quite straight now I don't want to crop it because I'd only remove this information I should have mentioned this before but just to make sure it's clear the crop tool is a document tool in other words you can't crop a layer because if you tried to crop one layer it would crop every layer so the crop tool doesn't help us as much when it comes to individual layers when you want to do things like crop or straighten a layer you can't use the crop to sew the crop tools going to do our overall document not individual layers so this layer yeah it's a little crooked by the way the photo was taken so I would go to a tool called the ruler tool and when you have the ruler tool you khun drag across something that's supposed to be straight and then up in the options bar you'll see there is a button that says straighten layer and when I hit it it straightens the layer relative to where I said was straight but now if I were to look at this looks to me like the overall photo itself is looks like it's kind of crooked so how would I deal with that because I can't crop it so what I would do instead is take my rectangular marquis tool and this will confirm you can see here that it's now the photo isn't quite straight so I'm goingto make a selection to say that's the part I want to keep an eye on this layer I would add a layer mask we talked about masking before straightening will straighten the photo relative to where were you draw that line but the edge of it overall might still be a little crooked but visually it looks better so then in this case the extra step was too make a selection and then make a layer mask to be able to get to this point so the important distinction is again the crop tool is a document wide crop you cannot prophesying the layer the straighten function with the ruler tool lets you straight in fact that you saw the button is called straighten layer so that's really what his purpose is for if you have a photograph where is working on one photo and overall it's crooked then you have both those options of using camera raw to straighten it but honestly I like photo shop now because of the way it's a lot more interactive as you drag that lying to say this is what's supposed to be straight it orients and you can see right on the screen whether you like the way it looks or not one of the things that's important to remember throughout this whole process is that if I had cropped and save this j peg there'd be no going back whereas when I look at this raw file even though I've closed that file on my screen working it's still here and this little symbol again means at any time the way raw files work is they just are left the way you leave them so now I could always go back in and say just let's clear that crop and get our original photo and just hit done so now over in bridge you'll see that it updates the thumbnail to remind me that it's still been adjusted some other way but at least that crop symbol is gone so if you ever are looking through images like this one you can see it has been cropped in this case it happens that it was rotated and crop but of course the symbol doesn't tell me that I just know that it has been something has been done to it so at least we have that option now the last couple of versions or the last version I should say a camera raw has some interesting abilities in terms of making adjustments that are related to cropping but kind of different but also nicely automatic so if you have situations like this where you take photographs and because of the situation you can't quite stand right in front of it straight on or the perspective is a little off because of the ledger using maybe it's little white angle so it has a that a fish I going on one of things that camera raw does and this is the last couple of versions of camera does this is we have options where you can first of all say enable lens profile correction and it recognized is based from the metadata that I used this lens and if I turn this on off you can see see how it's doing a little bit of working with the distortion that came so it changes that a little bit and in some case you'll see a very dramatic difference other cases you won't see much of a difference at all the other option is to go in to this manual extraction this part is new in the very latest version of camera and this allows me to say I want to apply perspective changes so it says and look at what happens it basically is as it was kind of tilting back a little bit and now when I hit this now yes I lose a little bit of information but now it looks more natural and this is a function called upright these are all the different offense we can do this balanced perspective on ly level correction level and vertical perspective and you'll see some of these like this last one that does apply everything that in order for a technically toe look straight you lose part of the image so that on top of this I'd have to use the crop tool and say all right let's crop this as best we can and I'm still gonna lose a little bit there but I can hopefully get some of that back using some of our other retouching technology but now if I had opened object you see it looks much more like I was standing straight onto this compared to what it looked like when I first started which was something that was kind of off on a ah weird kind of an angle and if we go back to camera defaults and clear any crop you can see this was the original photograph so let's go back this is the original this is what I was able to do so with a couple of quick steps so that's a pretty nice option that's available in cia six they also will be introduced a new tool there used to be an option with the crop tool is called perspective now there is a new tool again this is new as off for a shop cs six and the idea of it is if you have a photograph where because of the angle that you were at and the lens you had the perspective is a little off it's kind of tilting away from you and you want we want to see if we can adjust that someone so the perspective crop tool lets me go in here and there are various ways use that I find often I start off by coming in close to the edges of the building and try to kind of follow that line and then once I've got that then we expand this out as best we can and then when we get enter you'll see now it attempts to put a better perspective on this case I was a little off so it's a little squished but that's basically the idea where it allows you to take a photograph where the perspective is a little bit out of whack and then you can adjust it accordingly uh if you play with that more you'll find there's more settings I just kind of did it very quickly based on drawing that myself and adjusting it but it's it's actually a pretty good tool for situations where you may not have a choice because of the lens you have with you or the angle you're forced to take a photograph where the perspective is a law I deliberately chose one which was fairly dramatic I think it works even better when it's just slightly off of perspective you wanted just a little bit okay so when we're working with the crop tool and I alluded to this briefly before I just want to spend another minute or two talking about this is this list and this is again to some degree photo shop see essex and cc they tweaked a little bit further we have some built in options but if you knew that you were doing a project where you needed to have twelve eighty by seven twenty now notice I'm not putting in inches this is an aspect ratio sixteen by nineteen which is a video one so that happens to be built in but I could also decide to make this a new crop to a precept so that I know it reminds me this is my video one of twelve eighty by seven twenty so what that means of course is now as I'm working I put it back to the original ratio and then I decide oh I need to see if I can make this a fit for working and video instead of having to put numbers in I could just go to my pre set that I've created and then it will show me what this is the area you have from within this image which part of this would you like to work on now remember it is a document based functions so take a quick look overhearing escape out of this for a second you can see that I do in fact have two separate layers the background layer and the layer with a mask but when I go to my tool preset it's showing me a preview to say well I have to flatten it he's not really flattened but we're gonna say that and then from in this window I can say okay now let's get a little closer so I can decide I think I want this area here now if I decide I like this area but this layer needs to be moved moved up a bit I can't do it right the moment because I'm in the middle of cropping and that's one of those functions that we talked about earlier on is that if you're in the middle of doing something especially if you look and see all the menus are great out that means you have to either committed or cancel it to be able do something in this case I don't want to commit to my crop quite yet so I'm goingto escape out of it now I can take this layer and use my move tool and kind of shifted up a little more then go back to the crop tool which will still be set on twelve eighty by seven twenty make sure that's all it is and then now I khun move this and now I'm seeing what I wanted the background and this one where I want in front of it once I hit enter it still has the layer so now I could still make decisions left right in terms of go this way and if I go up or down you see though because I have delete the prop pixels turn on I can't show any more of it so in this case my only real option is to stick within the boundaries of what I crop so if you're working with multiple layers this is the way that you can go in and say all right I'm going to still preserve all my layers when I go to crop it it temporarily treats it almost like it's flattened so you can see a preview what you're gonna get once you have cropped then you still can work with the individual layers but this is again why I keep coming back to the delete trop pixels or not the answer was to use that will depend entirely on what it is you want to do next in this case if I wanted to still have access to the rest of that layer I want to make sure I did not delete the crop pixels because I want to have access to the part that was outside that cropping area now once again in today's example since we're talking about cropping there's really you don't have to there's no point in giving an assignment to say make your best crop and submitted for evaluation because honestly it's it's propping but I do want you to experiment with the difference between delete crop pixels on her off and also cropping and kameron opening in photo shop as a smart object versus cropping in photo shop again if you're new to see a six and or c c and you I haven't got used to the way this crop tool works I suppose it's ok if you turn on that classic moment but honestly I would suggest you don't because as much as at first you're like what is going on here the way the crop tool works now makes so much better sense in fact I've shown it to brand new beginners or never use photos off they're like okay I get the crop till then I show them the old way usedto work before csx not like so I would suggest that as much as you might be used to the old crop tool this new method really does work quite nicely and it's well worth it especially just because of that delete croft pixels or not so just take some time experiment with those different options for cropping you can also try cropping toe add mohr canvas to your image or using a selection tool and using crop under the edit menu just so you get a feel for the different ways of doing it also encourage you to before you start to any cropping look at the image size to see what you're starting with crop it and then go back to the image size command to see what influence cropping also has on image size okay and we'll see you tomorrow

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Melinda Wong
 

Very good teaching. I really liked how clear Dave was with everything, the order he taught the material, and I thought the stories were very helpful. I REALLY wanted to understand photoshop and extremely thankful for his wisdom and knowledge. Thank you so much! This is what was holding me back from getting my photography started! :) It just seemed so intimidating and now I have a greater understanding.

a Creativelive Student
 

I'm a beginner and have found that the information Dave gives is great, although a little to fast at times. I'd like to buy the course but am curious. If I purchase can I watch it and pause it and rewind it? That would be extremely important to me. Thanks for a great service CreativeLive...

a Creativelive Student
 

Lots of information! Initially I thought I'd just watch the free version as I already have several Creativelive videos on Photoshop but I really like how the classes are broken into subjects and shorter, 1 hour sessions-it will make reviewing much easier! I love Dave's teaching style-he covers everything very well. (Plus the fact that he's Canadian, eh?) :D Thanks for offering such a great course! I'd would love to see Dave do a similar one on Illustrator.

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