It seems simple enough. Drag the copy tool across your image, adjust the sides to your wishes and hit enter. You’ve cropped your image. But there is more. Here are a few uses you may not know about.
Keeping the same proportions
1. Keeping the same proportions
For many end uses, I find it useful to keep the same proportions as the original, usually 2×3 or 3×2. This is a simple task with the crop tool. Just hold down the Shift key as you drag the tool across the image and you’ll find that the crop has been restrained to the original proportions.
Do a perspective crop
2. Do a perspective crop
You can change the perspective while you are cropping. After dragging your crop tool to create a marquee, you can click on the Perspective checkbox on the tool’s menu at the top. This allows you to shift any of the corners of the marquee, increasing or decreasing the perspective from that side.
Crop and Rotate
3. Crop and rotate
After dragging your crop tool to make a marquee in your image, you can rotate your crop before finalizing it. Just hold your mouse outside any corner and click and hold when the double arrow shaped courser appears. You can then drag your marquee in the direction you wish to rotate. Double click inside the marquee or hit enter to finish.
Hide your crop, don't delete
4. Hide your crop, don’t delete
I can find little real world use for the next secret of the cropping tool, but its kind of cute. It needs to be done on an image layer rather than the background, so double-click on the background layer in your layers menu to convert it. After setting your marquee, click the Hide checkbox and complete your crop by hitting the Enter key. If you change to the move tool (The up arrow at the top), you will find you can move the image around and the portion that was outside your crop will appear, as it was not deleted. I suppose this might be useful if you wanted to look at various crops of a certain size.
Crop to match dimensions of another image
5. Crop to match dimensions of another image
Select the crop tool and make the image whose dimensions you want to match the active one. At the tool menu bar at the top, click on “Front Image”. Applying the crop tool to a second image will automatically provide a crop if the same dimensions as the first image.
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