As you probably know, the crop tool is a quick and easy way to cut down the image and canvas while only keeping a portion of the shot that you want.
Today I’m going to share some tips that I have found very useful as a video editor,and have met some graphic designers as well who didn’t know you can do this in one step.
The crop tool, a scalpel icon located in the left toolbar, is used by dragging a box over an area of your image and hitting enter to crop. You can constrain the proportions of the image by aspect ratio or a set size in pixels or inches etc.
This makes it the most commonly used Photoshop tool for video editors, before bringing pictures into the editing timeline. Photoshop has much better “math” for dealing with resizing of images than video editing programs do, so it’s suggested to use it for any still image manipulating instead of using video editing tools.
An unknown feature of the Crop tool among many video editors and some graphic designers, is the ability to make an image bigger.
When you think of cropping you might think cutting out a piece of an image to make a new one is what it’s for. Which is true but also if you zoom out enough to see the outside of your canvas, you can drag the crop box outside of the boundaries; then perform the crop to both enlarge the image and the canvas in one move.
So with the ability to select aspect ratio or pixels, this is absolutely the most awesome tool for video editors in particular, as it does 3- 4 things at once; resizes the canvas, resizes the image to selected aspect ratio and uses only your selected portions of the image.
Hope you found this tip useful. Use this for minor tweaking of image size, not for doubling the size of an image as it will probably start to pixellate.
Another cool thing to use the crop too for is perspective change, see this free video from the adobe how to series to learn how. What do you use the crop tool for the most? Leave a comment and let us know.
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