Basic Photoshop Tutorials for Beginners

How to Use Crop Tool in Photoshop

In this post, you will learn how to use the Crop Tool in Photoshop. I tried to explain and teach all aspects of using this tool. I used a simple method that if you are not already familiar with Photoshop, you can still learn everything you need to know about the Crop Tool.

How to select Crop Tool in Photoshop

In the simplest possible way to use the Crop Tool, click on its icon in the toolbar or use the C shortcut. ( Visit Basic Photoshop Tutorials for Beginners to read more articles about basic Photoshop tutorials. )

Crop Tool in the Toolbar
Crop Tool in the Toolbar

After selecting the cropping margin appears around the image.

cropping margin
Cropping Margin

Resetting the cropping border

Sometimes we drag the crop margin and change it, but we are not satisfied with the result, and we want to return the margin to its original state. The best way in such cases is to choose another tool such as Move Tool and then select the Crop again.

How to Use Crop Tool in Photoshop

There are eight handles in the crop margin around the image; you can click on them to be able to change the size of the picture. The handles are located in the image’s corners and the middle of the sides of the photo.

Crop Handles
Crop Handles
Resizing
Resizing

Another way to resize the image is to click and drag it somewhere on the image while the crop is selected. In this case, the crop tool will change the image size based on our drag.

To Maintain the height and width ratio of the image during crop operation, you can hold down the shift key and drag one of the handles in the corners of the picture.

Shift + drag
Shift + drag

Reset, Cancel and Commit

There are icons in the options bar. If you are dissatisfied with the result of the crop, you can select Reset so that the changes are not applied and return to the first state.
Also, by clicking on Cancel, you can cancel all the changes related to the crop or accept them by selecting Commit. Choosing any other type of tool will mean accepting the changes.

Reset Cancel Commit
Reset Cancel Commit

How can the crop border be resized from the center?

Press and hold the Alt key on your keyboard while dragging a handle to resize the border from its center.

I’m dragging the left side handle while also moving the right side handle.

Hold Alt for resizing from center
Hold Alt for resizing from center

What’s the best way to undo the crop?

Undo the cropping by going to the Edit menu and selecting Undo Crop. Alternatively, use the Ctrl+Z keyboard shortcut (Win)

Undo crop
Undo crop

What’s the Straighten tool?

To select Straighten Tool while the Crop Tool is already selected, click on the tool icon in the Options Bar.

Straighten Tool
Straighten Tool

Look for something that should be straight in your image, either vertically or horizontally. It’s the car windows line in my instance. Drag from one end to the other while keeping your mouse button pressed.

Releasing the mouse button will cause the crop to occur based on the line drawn. To straighten the image, Photoshop rotates it. Because rotating the image caused some translucent sections in the document’s corners (shown by a checkerboard pattern), Photoshop also resized the crop border to remove those transparent corners.

Using Straighten Tool
Using Straighten Tool

Change a cropped image by unchecking Delete Cropped Pixels

Sometimes you crop an image, but then you change your mind and want to return the parts of the image you cut to the picture. But you will notice that those parts were removed from the image after crop. You can uncheck Delete Cropped Pixels in the Options Bar and then perform the crop operation to solve this problem.

Delete Cropped Pixels
Delete Cropped Pixels

Babak Siminzar

My name is Babak Siminzar, and photography is my hobby. Digital photography made me use Adobe Photoshop to edit images, and I started learning Photoshop. I gained experience this way, but I still continue learning Photoshop.

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