Crop and resize an image with Photoshop

Photoshop’s crop tool allows us to remove unnecessary areas of an image, with the possibility of resizing if desired in the same step.

In this article we are going to see how to work with Photoshop’s crop tool. Today this tool seems very basic to me, but I still remember when Photoshop was a mystery to me and I saw a friend cropping an image with the crop tool. I said right away: “Hey, stop there a minute! How did you do that?” and it is that we have all been rookies at some time and we need to open our eyes, or speed up our ability to be self-taught.

In any case, although this article is simple, it comes in handy, since I am writing a series of explanatory texts about the Photoshop tools, which we have been publishing on in the . So I hope this text will help, especially for the most inexperienced people who don’t have a designer friend to show them things.

Photoshop Crop Tool

We locate the Photoshop crop tool in the panel or toolbar of the program. It has an icon with this shape:

This tool should always be visible in the toolbar, since, at least until Photoshop CS2, it stands alone in the panel box. CS2 is the version of the program we are using for this .com web development Photoshop tutorial. So there is no way the tool is hidden.

Its operation is extremely simple, very similar to the rectangular selection tool, although with some added functionality. We simply have to select an area, clicking anywhere on the image and dragging to any side.

The crop tool makes a rectangular selection of the area marked with the mouse, which we can edit once done, to adjust it to the desired dimensions. The selection that is created will look like this:

The selection can be edited instantly by placing the mouse on the edge or corner of the selection made. We will see that the mouse pointer changes and becomes a line with arrows to the sides. That means we can left-click and drag to resize the selection.

We can also move the selection to another place on the image. To do this, we click anywhere within the selection (except the point that appears in the middle of it) and drag to the place where we want to place it.

Once we have created the selection of the area we want to cut, we can order the cut by pressing the Enter key, or by right-clicking anywhere in the selection and selecting the Crop option. Photoshop will then crop the image and we will be left with only the part of the image that we had selected.

We can also cancel the selection at any time with the Escape (ESC) key.

Resize and crop in one step

To finish with the review of the cropping tool in this article from , we are going to see how we can crop an image and resize it, all in one step.

When we select any Photoshop tool, a tool options panel appears. This panel is usually located at the top of the program’s interface, below the menu bar, although it may be elsewhere or not even visible. It has this form:

If we don’t see it, we can show it from the Window – Options menu.

So, to simply resize the cropped area, before making the crop selection, we write some values ​​in the width and height options. In the previous image we have placed 120 pixels as width and 60 pixels as height. Then, when making the selection we will see how it maintains the proportions of that indicated size. Then, when we press Enter, the selected area will be cropped and resized to the size marked in the options.