Image Cropping: Tips for Non-Destructive Editing in Photoshop

Let's talk about cropping images. There's actually more to cropping than you might think. There's some cool tips and tricks and things that are important to know when cropping in your images.

It might sound straightforward, we just go to our crop tool and remove some unwanted part of the image, but there are some important things to consider when you're doing this. Namely, what's going to happen to those pixels that you're removing. By default, when we come into the crop tool, we see the settings for the crop tool,  and when I bring this in, maybe there's some unwanted parts of the photo that I don't want,  I want to make it smaller, maybe I want this landscape feature here to be the center part of my image, and maybe I think there's too much clouds and sky.

If I choose the default,  which is to delete those cropped pixels, when I hit this little check mark here,  or I double click anywhere inside, so the little check mark there says I like this,  or if I don't like it, I can hit the cancel or hit escape. But if I hit the commit or just double click anywhere inside, that accepts that. But let's say I were to save and close this file,  I have permanently deleted those pixels, they are gone.

Now luckily I still have the file open,  so I can go to my history, and I can go back to when I opened it, but keep in mind that some changes are destructive. Your history is no longer there when you open a file back up,  it is only there while you have that file open, and only remembers the last, by default,  50 things that you've done. So I'm going to go back to when I opened this, where I had all of the image, and when I go to my crop tool, this time I'm going to uncheck delete crop pixels.

By unchecking that, even though I go in and crop this, it has kept those pixels. And notice it has converted my background layer into a layer zero. That is a regular layer.

Regular layers are capable of being transparent, and also having more information that goes beyond the boundaries of your file. Background layers, basically what you see is what you get. They're more simple.

If I use my move tool, it actually has all of my original image. It's still there. It's all there.

That layer that's there, this is like a regular kind of like sheet of glass kind of layer where there's pixels on it. So it can be transparent, but it can also extend beyond the boundaries of my image, this canvas that I'm working in. So that's very interesting, which means that I can go back to my crop tool, and I can extend this, and I can get some of those pixels back.

If I had left it on the default, which was to delete, they would be gone. Let me actually,  let's say I do that, and I choose delete. Those pixels are gone.

There is nothing out beyond the boundaries of my canvas. So unless I can undo, if I saved and closed this file, I'd be stuck. I would have lost those pixels.

Now I've done some changes here. I just want to just revert to the last time that I saved this, which was basically when I opened up the file. So I'm going to go to file and just say revert.

And revert is basically, it's kind of like closing the file and opening it back up again so that you get back to the last time that you had saved, or the last time the file had been saved. So this is in its original state with all of the pixels back. Now that only works if you haven't saved, right? If I had saved at some point,  revert would just go to the last saved version.

So it's not like you can, you know, close a file,  save the changes, and later say revert. It's not like it's going to remember some old version of that image. No, it's just saying basically close it down and open the file back up again.

Now this image here is on an angle. I didn't quite, when I was taking this photo, I didn't have my camera perfectly level. It's because we're on a highway and we're driving, you know,  let's say whatever the speed limit was, 60,70 miles an hour, and kind of going through the middle of nowhere, you know, just on a straight highway and we're passing beautiful scenery.

And this came up really quickly and I just grabbed my camera real quick, opened up the window and just snapped this shot. But I didn't have time to straighten my camera up because before you know it, this was gone, right? So this was the only shot I could get. But I still want to straighten this photo,  even though it doesn't need a lot of straightening.

Another nice thing we could do when we go to the crop tool is, let's say I uncheck delete because I don't want to delete anything. There is a straighten tool built into here. If I choose my straighten and then I drag over a line that should be straight, either perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical, I can drag over, let's say,  a horizon line that should be a perfectly straight horizontal line.

And it doesn't matter whether it's a horizontal line or if it was a building, let's say it's a vertical line, either one would work. But it should be perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical. When I let go, it then makes that straight.

How cool. It automatically straightened it. We can come out here outside of the crop area and notice that my cursor becomes a little bent arrow.

I could also manually straighten it as well. I can always do that if I so desire. But I like the straighten tool because it's so easy.

You simply drag over something that should be straight and it makes it so. So it figures that out. Now, it did have to rotate this.

And if I pull this out,  there are some empty areas here that I would either need to crop off or I would need it to fill. So what is it going to do in those areas if we pull this out and we leave those empty transparent areas, which I'm going to do on all four sides, because this looks like a pretty easy thing for it to fill, for it to figure out using its content aware fill as opposed to its AI generative expand. Generative expand is good for things where it really needs to make stuff up using artificial intelligence, but it does have limited resolution.

So especially if you have a more blurry, non-detailed generation. If at all possible, because content aware works at full resolution, I always choose content aware whenever possible. It does not use artificial intelligence.

It just looks at your image and tries to figure out, let's take some of this and let's make some new stuff over there. If especially for little areas like this,  content aware fill will do this perfectly well. And it'll be at the same full resolution of this original image.

Now you do have to choose this now, if you already had accepted the crop and then you try to come back and do it later, it won't work a second time. You have to do this in your initial crop. All right.

And then I can either hit the check mark up there,  or I can hit done, but I'm just going to hit the check mark up there, or I can also double click anywhere inside. Takes a second to figure out what to put there. And the way that it's doing that again is just by kind of taking some of the stuff and filling in those areas.

Now it is always a good idea to look at those areas and see some of those are fine,  but some of those areas, not so fine. Like I don't like what it did here. So I can always go back in like we did previously, select an area and say to fill that differently.

So I can say fill with content aware, and it'll do a second guess. We could also use our spot healing brush as well. Go in with a smaller brush that's more appropriate for this area.

And it'll take a different guess at what it should put there. Some things like this look perfectly fine. That looks great.

Now here I do see that there's duplicates here. So I'd want to go hit that again and maybe again until it creates something that's new. That's not just a repeat of exactly what's there.

That looks better. Looking all around those edges. And I think the top looks good.

Now over here on the left, I noticed here, not really a big fan of this. I think the bottom's fine, but maybe I go in here and just do this area. And I kind of like that.

That's better. This area here, I think was a little bit challenging for it. So I can try having it do that area again.

That's definitely better. Yeah, that's fitting much better. And try it one more time.

Okay. All right. So that is a nice finished result.

You can also crop to a specific aspect ratio. When you go to your crop tool, first you can take a look at this ratios menu. Here you can see things like four by fives, which is the same as an eight by 10, five by seven.

You could do a video, a movie aspect ratio of 16 by nine. But let's say I do a five by seven,  for example. Here now I can crop into that specific aspect ratio.

As I drag to the left,  it goes horizontal. As I drag up, it goes vertical. Once you've got the correct aspect ratio and kind of horizontal versus vertical, you can size and then drag in the middle here to position your image inside of it.

And once you have that the way that you like,  you can hit the check mark or done to accept that. What I would recommend is if you're not going to always want to choose a five by seven aspect ratio before you're done, I would hit clear because the next time you come to this tool, it's going to remember that aspect ratio. When you hit clear, just clears it for the next time you're going to use it and does not change your current crop.

You still have that aspect ratio. And then you can go ahead and hit done for your finished crop. Now I want to show you one other way to straighten a photo other than cropping.

If you want to do the whole photo while you're cropping, great. But here's another option. Let me revert my file here.

Okay. So this is the original file. It is not straightened, right? Because I got rid of that change.

Let's say that you've added type to this. If I use my type tool and I click in here, this is type. Okay.

And I'm going to make that a lot bigger. It's not so important what that says or that we can read it. I just want us to see that there is some type there.

If I were to use my crop tool, it would rotate the entire file and that would make the type not straight. Let me just show you. If I use my crop tool and I use my straighten to straighten this, this is straightening the entire file.

Notice how my type gets rotated. This is rotating the entire file. That's not what I want in this case.

So I can either hit escape on my keyboard or I can hit the cancel button up here, or I could also cancel down here. Instead, if I already have other layers that I don't want to change, I could straighten one layer. I'm just not going to do that with an individual tool, like a crop tool.

I'm going to do it with a crop tool. I'm going to do it with something different. So let's say your file is fine,  except for one layer.

So I just want to change this one layer. I don't want to change anything else. I don't want to do the file.

I want to do a layer. When you want to do a layer,  you select that layer and you go into a tool. It's hidden behind the eyedropper tool.

We press and hold to get to the hidden tools, to the ruler tool. Now the ruler tool can be used to measure things such as the angle at which you want to rotate something. So I can do kind of like I did with the straighten.

I can drag my ruler from one side to the other to say that should be a horizontal line. It measures the angle of that line. So it says, hey, the angle of that is minus 1.7 degrees and it can straighten that layer.

So I want to make sure that I choose the layer that I want to straighten. Now notice the straighten layer is grayed out. Why is that grayed out? This layer is not, but this layer is.

That's because if it were to rotate this,  it might create empty areas. And so notice the background has a lock. When you have a background that's locked, there's certain things that don't work.

But when I unlock those, then,  oh, look at this. Now the straighten layer works. So keep in mind, you don't always have to have a background layer.

You can convert your background layers, which have limitations. Background layers cannot be transparent. Background layers cannot extend beyond the boundaries of your canvas.

Background layers, not everything works on them. You can unlock it and it becomes a regular layer. So I could call this my photo.

And now that's a regular layer,  it unlocked this straighten feature. When I click straighten, it just rotates that one selected layer. So to repeat, let me undo.

If you have a background layer, you've got to unlock it. And when you go into your ruler tool, you choose the angle that should be straight. This is either a vertical or horizontal line.

And then you come up and you click straighten layer,  just make sure you have that layer selected. And then it straightens that layer. And then I could use my crop tool here and just crop in there.

If you wanted to extend it like this, you would have to load these transparent areas up as a selection and then say to fill those or you could paint over them. If I want to fill those, I can go to my photo layer and I could either use my spot healing and out of the way. I could drag over this area to heal it.

That's one way I could do this. If you'd like to paint, you could paint over that area and it heals that area. Or the other thing I could do is I could select those transparent areas.

There's actually a built-in selection for that. I can choose my layer and I can say, let's select and I'm going to load a selection and I'm going to use that photo's transparency to create a new selection. So wherever it's transparent, it's going to make a selection.

The only thing is I want everything that is transparent. Right now, it's giving me the stuff that is solid, that's visible. Let me just show you.

If I fill this with, let's say my,  my, let's do 50% gray. See how it's filling the photo. So it selected the things that weren't transparent.

I actually wanted the things that were transparent. So let me undo that. So I want to select the opposite and that is inversing your selection.

If you say inverse,  that creates the opposite selection. So that'll select the things that are transparent. Now I've got those little empty areas and then I could fill those areas.

If I say to fill,  I could fill those with my content aware. So I don't have to paint over those and it will fill those in and I can get rid of that selection. Then I just have to look if there's any areas that I need to fix.

Sometimes it will leave a little sliver of area like this, where if I look closely, so it didn't quite make that selection perfectly. If that's the situation, let me undo and go back a couple of steps here before I filled. If that selection is a little too small, like it is right now, I can expand that selection to make it a little bit bigger.

I can go to select and I could say to modify it. And I want to expand it just a couple of pixels, like maybe one or two pixels. Expand makes, means to make bigger or contract means to make smaller.

If I said to expand,  I could expand by one or two pixels. It's not a lot, just a teeny little line. I could, I could expand those transparent areas by maybe two pixels, just makes them bigger.

And that way,  when I do my fill with content aware, we don't get those little slivers there. And now that looks good. There still might be some areas where I want to come back and just hit certain areas again, just to avoid that repetition.

So those are some ideas for you as you're cropping or wanting to straighten your images. So go ahead and try exercise 1C in your book to put this into practice.