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Crop

Accessing the crop tool

To access the crop tool, click on the button from the toolbar located on the left of the Photoshop window.

Once you have the crop tool selected, your cursor should change to a cursor. Click anywhere on the image and drag to create a box. Once you have a box like the image below, you can drag one of the eight square points on the corner and middle of the edges to stretch the box. You can also rotate the crop area by clicking an dragging your mouse over the black tinted area.

Width, Height and Resolution

If you look near the top of the Photoshop window, you'll notice settings for the crop tool that you can set. This area is called the option bar. Anytime you select a tool, this option bar will change showing you the settings available for the tool. If you already made a crop box, press the ESC key on your keyboard to cancel out of it. Once you've done that, your option bar should look similar to the image below.

For the crop tool, you can enter in the width, height, and resolution. These setting will allow you to specify the image size and resolution after you crop. For example, if you enter in Width: 800px, Height: 600px, and Resolution: 72 pixels/inch, after you crop the image size will be 800x600 pixels at 72 pixels/inch.

When you set the width and height, it will not let you change the aspect ratio of the crop box. This means that you won't be able to stretch the box.

There is also a front image and clear button. The front image button will take the current image's width and height and enter it into the option bar. What this does is when you crop the image, it'll make upscale the image to the same image size as the original image. The clear button simply removes all the settings.

Shield Color

When you create a crop area, the option bar will change giving you more options.

First, the shield check box and color simply lets you set what appearance the surrounding is. If you uncheck the shield check box, the surrounding area of the crop area will not be tinted. If you enable it, you can set the color and opacity. This is just for the personal preference and does not affect the image in any way.

Perspective

Another option available when you have a crop area selected is the perspective check box. When checked, this does is lets you click and click and drag on the corners to distort the crop area. This is useful for correcting the perspective of photos.