Cropping an image

- [Instructor] So again, we're going to pretend here that we've had another request from the client and what they want to do is actually crop this in slightly and change the size of the image that they're going to use. And we're going to do it non-destructively, so that we keep the data because here's the thing, clients sometimes like to change their mind back. And so we need to give ourselves a route back, and that's the whole thing with non-destructive editing full stop really, is saving you doing that. One of the reason I learnt so many things inside of the design tools in Photoshop is that I wanted to be prepared for when customers came back to me with changes, so that I could deal with them as quickly as possible.

Okay, so I need to move my roundel across. I brought in the roundel from earlier and what I'm going to do is just bring that in slightly. And then I'm going to tap C on my keyboard and that gets me the crop tool. Okay? And when you do that this crop shield will appear around the edges of the current image area, or should do. You got some choices here, if you have a particular ratio, or size that you need to crop to, then you could access this drop-down here.

You could crop to width and height times resolution and fill in these fields just here. So for example if I went, just for argument sake, to 16 to nine, widescreen format, and thought, "Actually I want nine to 16." I can transpose those by clicking that like so, and then I've got a new ratio. I'm just going to clear that by clicking and then just choose Ratio as it is from the top here. So if I drag this around, like so, I can change my crop and I've got this grid over the top, it's a rule of thirds grid, which you might remember from the layout chapter.

And if you need to there are other grids that you can use. There's the golden ratio, the golden spiral. So for example if I was composing to that then I could bring this in like so. So if I thought that was an important compositional element, course I'd go slightly different to that and lead into it rather than be dead on it there, but I could do that. And I could choose triangles, so I've got triangle sets there for arrangement. Lots of different things to use. But I'm going to use the rule of thirds for this image. So I'm going to bring this out, like so, to the edge.

And what I want to do is get that just lined up so there's an area of interest here between the leg and the backpack. Bring that in just a shade on the side there. And then just bring that down a bit like so and I think for this that's just fine. All I need to do now before I commit this is make sure that Delete Crop Pixels at the top here is not selected. Because if I need to go back to that once the crop is affected, then all I need to do is select the crop tool, I'll just drag across here.

You'll see that if I pull out to the sides all of that content is still there. So if the customer or client came back to me and said, "Oh actually I needed that taller", then I could just do that like so, and bill them for the extra work. (chuckles) So there you are. I'm going to hit the tick and that's it. Excellent, we're done.