Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Resizing & Cropping Images / Cropping Images pt. 1
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Resizing & Cropping Images / Cropping Images pt. 1)
Alright, you survived Resizing Images inside Photoshop. Give yourself a pat on the back. Now, for something entirely different and super easy. We're going to kind of cruise through the remainder of these few lessons here. Cropping Images. That's easy. That's fun. So, here's what we'll do. I closed out of everything that I had open inside Photoshop here and I want you to open up another Project file here, so again I'll just double-click on my gray background and I'll head into my Project Files and inside our Project Files we have a file called Cropping.jpg. Go ahead and pop that guy open. Alright, so here we go. Now if I zoom in on this image just a little bit you'll notice that my drafty barn is somewhat askew. He's leaning somewhat to the left and I want to try and straighten that up, so I want to show you a couple of different things here. I want to show you Cropping, I want to show you Straightening and some other cool things here. I'll also show you something called Increasing or Resizing something called the Canvas here inside Photoshop. I'll get to that in just a little while. But here's the deal in terms of cropping your photos and straightening them out and all this good stuff. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use Photoshop's Crop Tool and he's nice and easy to work with. He's found down inside the Toolbox there. You can just hit your C key on your keyboard if you want, just grab this fella here and all I'm going to do, quite literally, with this guy is simply click and drag out a box inside my image, and you know, in the real world I'm not even really that careful about it. I just kind of throw a box onto my image and then I start messing around with them. Now, a couple of things happen here. We get a dotted frame, some marching ants, inside our image and part of our image gets sort of tinted out or grayed out if you will. The area that's tinted out, or the area that's on the outside of this crop frame is the area that's going to get deleted from my photo, or removed from my photo. And then, of course, the area inside the crop frame would be kept. What's cool here is I can come along here before I commit to anything and I can resize my crop frame and I can do so simply by using the little handles that appear on the top and bottom, on the right- and left-hand sides of the crop frame or, of course, in all four corners of the crop frame as well. So I would come in here and I would sort of size things up. Do I want to get rid of that little weather vane on the peak of the roof there? Or maybe I want to try and keep that in, you know, it's really up to me. I'd have to think about that. Now, in terms of straightening my image - give me a second here, I'm just going to scale things down here a little bit - here's my technique. Everybody has their own method here but I'm going to zoom in on my image and it's kind of cool that I can zoom in while I'm still inside my crop frame here. I just hit Cmd-Plus, or Ctrl-Plus and I'm just holding down my Spacebar here and kind of repositioning my screen. This is how I do it, anyway. What I do is I try to line up the edge of the crop frame with something inside the photo that's supposed to be straight. Like I'm under the assumption that the edge of this barn, the left edge of the barn, should be straight inside the photo, so depending on the image. It might be a telephone pole, it might be the edge of a building, who the heck knows, right? And what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring my cursor outside of the crop frame, something like this and you'll notice that my cursor now changes to a curved double-headed arrow, suggesting that if I click and drag I can actually rotate my crop frame, which is really coolright? So, essentially what I would try and do and usually I just kind of eyeball it, is I want to try and get the crop frame essentially on the same angle as the object that I'm using inside my photo. So I've actually done kind of a half decent job there, which is surprising to me. And sometimes I'll even put the line right on top of the object, something like that, just to, you know, double check, just to make sure that it's nice and straight. Something like that. And I go, alright. That looks pretty good to me. So then I'll simply zoom out, Cmd-Minus or Ctrl-Minus and then simply size up the crop frame on this angle, you know, something like this. And again, I've got some lightning rod choices to make here. I'm going to wind up taking out some of it anyway, unfortunately, because I can't really crank it any higher than that because then I'm going to get some white space there in the top corner. I suppose it wouldn't be too bad in this sort of overcast sky, but, anyway. Decide how much of that foreground I want to keep, something like this, right? When I'm feeling good, when I feel that it's happening here I've got two choices now. I can either double-click with my mouse anywhere inside the crop frame or I can just hit the Enter key on my keyboard. Either way, what that does is that commits the Crop. It commits the change that I've made and now I have a nice straight barn photo inside Photoshop. So, there you go. That's kind of a quick idea anyway of how Cropping works. Now, I'd love to show you a new process inside Photoshop CS5 for straightening out your images, so we'll take a look at that next.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS5 |
| Author: | Geoff Blake |
| SKU: | 34150 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-46-1 |
| Release Date: | 2010-08-06 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 95 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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