Photoshop Crop Tool

Crop Tool (shortcut C) is used to select an area in an image and discard the rest of the area of the image. This is useful in cases where you just want to focus or save the desired area of an image ie remove the unnecessary portions. An example is shown below.

Let's remove the man and save only the cute baby. Select Crop Tool in the tool box (C). Now drag a rectangle defining the baby and release the mouse button. See below

You can move this selection area before cropping. Now press Enter. The result is the image is reduced to only the baby in the frame. Be cautious while cropping because after this the lost area cannot be recovered later when reopening the image after saving it. The cropped output of the above image is as follows

He's a cute, isn't he? So is this tool. There are options for Crop Tools too. With Crop Tool selected, look at the options pane.

On the left hand side you can see Crop Presets. These are the size of the documents after cropping, you can also define your own size in the empty boxes (width: height: ). In my opinion these are of no use. I'll discuss Resizing an image in details later. Crop Tool possesses another options box too. When the desired area is selected then the options pane turns to another box as shown below:

By default Shield is applied with a dark color. When Shield is turned off, the color and contrast of area to be saved and area to be discarded are same. With Shield feature turned on, the color (black here) indicates the color to show for the area to be discarded. Opacity defines the visibility of the image to be discarded. Try changing these values yourself. It has got nothing to do with the cropping feature. I may not have written about this, just wanted you to know.

Crop Tool can be alternatively used by combining it with Marquee Tool. I prefer doing this. Simply marquee select the desired area and go to the menu Image >> Crop and we're done cropping. Elliptical Marquee as well as Lasso Tools can also be used to define the areas but the results will be the same because in Photoshop the cropped area is always a rectanglular one. Try this and you'll understand what I'm saying.