Quite often it is necessary to crop a digital photograph so that the newly resulting image contains only one of the images of the original version. This is called photo cropping. This article is dedicated to how to do this.
Pruning targets
Cropping images is often necessary in many situations. For example, this way you can get rid of unnecessary details of the background and interior. Say, remove photos of unfamiliar and random people in a family photo taken in a park or on the beach, or crop an unaesthetic interior detail that also accidentally fell into the frame (for example, dishes in a photograph from a cafe or restaurant). Secondly, you can change the proportions of the image and correct the composition of the photo, making a certain object its center. Finally, framing opens up great opportunities when working with images of people and animals: you can cut out a person’s figure, portrait or image of a group of people who are in the crowd in the original image.
Photoshop Tools
So, cropping is the choice of the necessary fragment of the photo and cutting off the excess. This is one of the most basic and at the same time one of the simplest manipulations. In Photoshop, it can be done using a special crop tool or use the crop menu command on the main menu. Both of these methods are an alternative to each other, but the first one provides greater options for setting the borders of the desired part of the photo compared to the second.
Special tool cropping
The main sequence when cropping is to select the necessary fragment and confirm the command.
Open the image, in the "Tools" panel, select "Crop tool". Now you need to select the image fragment as if you were using the Selection tool. You need to draw a rectangle with this tool: select the cropping area, put the cursor in its upper left corner, press the left mouse button and do not let go. Now move the cursor to the lower right corner of the rectangle (the part of the image that will remain after cropping) and release the mouse button. Now the entire area that will be clipped (deleted) has become darkened. The last stage of framing is the confirmation of the command: press the enter key. After pressing it, the darkened area will be deleted. As a result, the file should be the fragment that you selected with the crop tool.
Change the original selection
Cropping a photo using the Crop command in Photoshop is convenient not only because the cut-off part of the image is darkened, as a result of which it is visually easy to determine how the new version of the image will look. The main advantage of this method is that you can easily adjust the original selection area. After you draw a rectangle, you can change its size, proportion, orientation and position. Bring the cursor to the borders of the selected area, click on the left mouse button and drag at any of its corners or at any edge - in any direction. You can also move the cursor to the outer corner of the area and drag up or down in a circle to rotate the rectangle around its axis (after cropping, the program will expand the image and position it so that the sides are vertical and horizontal). In addition, the area can also be adjusted by moving: you need to place the cursor inside the image and pull.
Crop with selection
The second way to crop is to use the crop command. In the Tools panel, select the Rectangular marquee tool and select the rectangle: move the cursor to the upper left corner of the rectangle that should remain after cropping, click the left mouse button and drag the cursor to the lower right corner. As a result, the image fragment will be highlighted. Now select the “Crop” command in the “Image” menu item, the image will be cropped.
Preparing for Fine Crop
For accurate cropping, you can select the future rectangle with guides. This method is convenient when you need to identify very precise borders on a large image and when their visual definition is not enough. For example, the border should go over the object that is visible only when the image is magnified strongly. In this case, it is convenient to first outline the exact location of the future face of the rectangle, and then select it.
Saving a document
One of the common cropping errors is to save a new version of the image without saving the original. It is often necessary to return to the original photograph, or cropping is unsuccessful.
In order not to make a mistake and not save only a new, cropped photo, you need to create a duplicate of the photo before working with it. By the way, this can be done every time when you plan to make any changes to the image and are not sure that the original photo will never be needed.
Open the file, in the menu item "Image" (Image) select "Duplicate" (Duplicate). Save the duplicate of the image and make changes to it, not being afraid that they will be unsuccessful or will not seem unsuccessful in the future.
The second way is to save the cropped image under a new name (using the “Save As” command), but the psychological nuance is that many professional designers often forget about it - especially with large volumes of work, processing several photos at the same time, or multi-stage work to which periodically return during the working day.
Crop with Copy
It is worth mentioning especially about cases when it is necessary not only to crop the image, but to cut out a fragment from it for further insertion into another file and creation of photo collages. To do this using framing is not entirely rational, since to mount an image from several fragments, it is not necessary to save these fragments as files. For these purposes, there is a more convenient and faster way - through copying.
Open the file from which you want to cut part of it, select it with the appropriate tool, first, if necessary, marking the boundaries with its guides, and then copy it by pressing ctrl + c (or by choosing the “copy” command in the “ Edit ”(Edit)). The selected part of the image will be placed on the clipboard (memory for copied elements) of the computer, and it can be pasted into a file (using the "Paste" command or by pressing the ctrl + v keys), opened either in Photoshop or another graphic or a text editor (for example, it’s very convenient to transfer photo elements to the Word file in this way). No changes to the original photo file need to be saved - it serves only as material for copying.
In the file opened in Photoshop, part of the image extracted from another file by copying will be placed as a new layer, which can be enlarged, reduced, rotated, transformed in other ways, or moved. If you save the file where the “frame” was placed, as a Photoshop file (psd), then you can return to editing all the inserted fragments even after closing the file and the program, since this format preserves layers.
Thus, framing in the Photoshop application can be done in several alternative ways, their choice depends on the goals and objectives of this operation and on the personal preferences of the designer.