Photoshop's Crop tool explained

Words & Pictures Barry Beckham/David Rowley

The crop tool is probably one of the easiest tools to use, but probably not used as often as it should. Use the crop tool to help the appearance of your image by enhancing the composition.

After clicking on the crop tool icon your preferences will appear along the top of the screen, but in it's basic use you can ignore them.

Draw out the box over your picture space and nine toggles will appear that allow you to vary the crop before you hit the enter key. Photoshop 6 also shades the area you have chosen to crop to help you to view your image and make the best choice.

You do have the opportunity to remove the shading or alter the opacity and colour, but there seems little point in that for general use and we found the default setting fine.

When you are happy with your crop selection hit enter to complete the command as shown below.

You also have the ability to turn the crop tool as shown above for a non standard crop. However, once the enter key is pressed the crop will be made and the result presented horizontal as shown below.

Another good feature of the crop tool is that you can add a border to your image by dragging the toggles outside of the picture area as shown below.

When you hit the enter button a border will be created in your chosen background colour, white in this case.