Lessons

Lesson Info

Crop Tool

this time we're heading into looking at tools and panels in photo shop. That means if you look in the left side of your screen, you see your tools panel. While they're all sorts of tools hidden in there, we're gonna take a tour of what's found there and then Each tool has settings that show up in a panel that spans the top of your screen, known as the Options Bar, and we'll take a look at some of the settings that air there. And then we'll look at what are all the panels that can show up on your screen? Eso Let's dive in so he can take his much time. It's possible here in Photoshop. So if we look at our tools panel on the left side of my screen at the very top, we have our move tool and the move to will be covered in a separate lesson that covered layers. And so we're gonna skip over it here. Below that, we have the marquee tool in the lasso tool, and below that, some more automated selection tools. We had a whole separate lesson on selection, so we covered those. Then the first tool w...

e really haven't talked about would be the crop toe. When I choose the crop tool, this is what I see. It just highlights the edge of my image, and then I congrats the sides or corners and pull this in. If I would like to limit how much of the image amusing in, I find most images could be improved, their cropping in this image. I think I can really clean this up if I get rid of some of these elements off on the side and get this in. So it just kind of has a nice framing around him. I might also crop down on the ceiling that's there to just bring it down to the grid that is behind him. And it's a matter of deciding then what should be included and excluded, and most the time. I'm going to try to simplify as much as I can. Once they get into something about like that, I think I'll have a nice image. But before I press return or enter to indicate I am done, you could also click this little check box at the top to indicate you're done. You should pay attention to a setting in your options bar and your option bar up here at the top of your screen is a setting called delete cropped pixels in by default. They believe it has that turned on. And what that means is, when I'm done cropping this image, whatever's outside of the cropping rectangle will be discarded. So if I save enclosed my image, open it up a month later, it will not be able to get back that information that's been cropped that will make my file size smaller, which be nice. But if I'm just not certain that the client I'm doing this for our is going to like this cropping, I might want to turn that off when I turned that off. Now the information outside the cropping rectangle will be retained. So if I press returner enter toe, actually crop the image in a later returned to the crop tool again, I will be able to grab the edge and pull it back out, and I'll see all that original content beyond the edge, and I could readjust. Just know that that's going to do a couple things. It is going to make it to your file. Size remains just as large as it was previously, and if you happen to have had a layer that was called background, it will no longer be called background. And that's because the background layer cannot contain what's known as big data. Big data is information that extends beyond the bounds of your document, and therefore I won't be able to save this image as a JPEG file or any other file format that does not understand layers without degrading without throwing away the information that goes beyond the edge. So you should just be aware of the limitations of it. But most the time I find that I have delete Crump pixels turned off because I like the versatility of be able to bring those areas back in later. Then, when you're using the crop tool, there's more you can do than just crop an image. You can also add space to a document. So if I go find a different document to work with in this case, I wish this was a vertical. Let's say, Well, maybe a magazine article wants to use it, and they need a little extra space in the height. Well, it could be that I end up bringing this over to make it a little bit more of a vertical image. But I just wish it was a bit taller so we could fit the name of the publication up here at the top. Well, we can just drag that up now. If we do just drag it up like that, then it's going to end up just outing empty space at the top, and that's what the checkerboard represents. But if you look in the options bar for the crop tool, you'll find there's a check box called Content Aware. And if I turn on the content aware Jack box any empty areas that we end up with by expanding space using the crop tool should be filled in for us automatically. And if it's a simple area like a blue sky, we might be able to get away with that. So here I'll press returner in term, and when I do, it thinks a little bit and it attempts to fill the sky. In this case, it did a terrible job that left just a big chunk up in the corner. But you could come in here and use the techniques we talked about during this session on retouching, which would be things like using the spot healing brush in painting over those areas where it messed up to see if you can get it, too. Put something else in there. In this case, I usually give it three strikes and it's out. In this case, it might get about six strikes. Come on, so you might have to do some manual work. But most of the time, when it is a simple blue sky, it's able to extend it, and it looks very nice. In this case. I'm going to come in and use the clone stamp tool, copy a little bit and put it over there and then used the spot healing brush ca blended in. Of course, it messes up, so I would need to do that manually. I'm actually not going to do that now because we have a whole separate session on retouching. But now that much of the time it is able to extend things, and here I'll grab the crop tool and see what happens if I try to extend it out. This where we had different information and you see how it's attempting to mimic what was there. But the more it needs to be precise information, we're only certain exacting shapes could work, the more it's gonna mess up. If it was just something simple, like gravel in that area or blue sky most the time, it does a fine job of just extending it and filling it in for you. But that was a check box called content, aware that we end up finding in the options bar for the crop tool. Then there's another version of the crop tool. And if you ever take a photograph and you tilt your camera up a little bit and you photograph of building, usually the top edge of the building will end up looking smaller from the bottom. And there is a version of the crop tool that can help fix that. If I click and hold on the crop tool, you'll find that there's more than one tool in that slot, and one of them is called the Perspective Crop Tool. When I choose that now, it expects me to click on the four corners of a rectangle, and I could go to the upper left of this building and click go to the upper right of this building. Click, Go where? I think the bottom of the building is Glick. And then go on. The left side is well needing to get the bottom. I've clicked now on all four corners of the building. And if I were depressed, Returner, enter to say I'd like to finish my crop. It will straighten that. So if any of the sides were vote in towards the top, they will be straightened. The problem was, it cropped everything else out of the image. So might be that I want to keep the surroundings on the image in just fix the amount due to the tilting. So if that's the case, I can again click on the four general corners of where the building would be. And once I'm done before a press return or enter, what I want to do is leave the corners alone and instead grab the sides and just get your mouth right on the side and pull it out to extend it. What'll happen is the angle of these sides will remain the same, but you're just expanded it out to say you would like to keep this extra space. Then you compress returner enter and it will correct it. So the grid that you see here will become a straight grid. You can see the edges are at angles right now. Ah, but it's not going to crop into the image so much. It's only gonna crop in the amount I have here. So therefore, I could correct for something like that without having to tightly crop in an image. But that's known as the perspective crop tool, and it's available in the same slot as the normal crop tool. Now, there are two other tools in there that we're not gonna cover here. I just thought I'd mention so you know what they do. But this is the sliced sliced tool in the slice selection tool they have to do with creating Web graphics. If you ended up creating a website in photo shop where you made a template of it and let's say it was your navigation bar in each little section of that navigation bar is gonna be a separate button, which will end up being a separate file that you're going to save to use in your website. You could use this slice tool to draw across each one of those button regions. And then when you save the image, if you do it by going to, ah, file an export, there's some options for the Web. You could save out the individual slices those regions that you define separately. But here we're not talking that much about Web specific techniques, so I just thought I'd mention them without actually using them.

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