Extend canvas by cropping

- [Narrator] Hello friends, and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. A few episodes back, I shared a technique for how we can extend our canvas, and here, in this episode, I want to show you one more way that we can do that, and this time, we're gonna talk about how we can do that with the crop tool. We'll be working with these three images here. So go ahead and select those. Click on one and bridge, hold down the Shift key, and click on the last one of the set, and then I'll go to Tools > Photoshop > Open as Layers or Load Files into Photoshop Layers and I'll go ahead and select that.

You can do the same thing coming from Lightroom as well. You can send multiple files over to Photoshop so that once you're in Photoshop, you have all of these images here inside of a single document. Now the advantage of that is that it gives you the ability to be able to work really quickly with lots of images. And let's say that what we want to do is create a layout with these three photographs. Yet our document size is confined to the size of the image, so we need to extend that. How can we do that really quickly? Well, if we tap the C key to select the crop tool and then make sure we clear off anything here, so it's just a freeform crop, we're not cropping to a dimension or a specific size, and then zoom out, Command + minus on a Mac, Control + minus on Windows, and then just extend this out, and you can see that all I'm doing here, really freeform, not really worrying about anything as far as size or dimensions or aspect ratio.

I'm just cropping, extending, and then I'll press Enter or Return. Now when we do that, we now have some space to work with. Now we also may want a background color, so to keep things simple, let's go ahead and do that. This way, we'll click on a new layer with the New Layer icon, double-click this. I'll name this BG for background. I'll go to Edit and Fill. There's a shortcut there, of course, you could use as well. I'll fill this with white, select white there, or it could have been my background color. Either one of those would have worked, background color or white, and then I'll click OK.

So now I have white in the background. Okay, well now we have our first image there. Grab the Move tool, click into another image, and let's click and drag this off. And let's say we want this one to be a little bit of a different size. Command + T on a Mac, Control + T on Windows, and we're gonna create a little bit of a layout like that. And maybe we'll scoot this one over here. And then we'll turn the visibility of this one on, Command + T that one on a Mac, Control + T on Windows. And again, just kind of having fun with different images and size and maybe we're creating some kind of a concept or just a few images that we want to have together on a page creating a little bit of a mock layout.

So in this way you can see the crop tool give us really, really quick access to being able to extend that canvas. Now when it comes time to cropping it down for size, where you could use a crop as well, and here we can just say, okay, let's bring this in, and let's bring this top part down a little bit and maybe something like that and press Enter or Return or double-click inside of the crop area. All right, well, there you have it. A really quick tip on how you can extend your canvas size and how you can do that using the crop tool.