Two quick crop techniques

- [Instructor] Hi, I'm Chris Orwig, and welcome to Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode, I'm going to keep things light and bright, and here what I want to do is talk about how we could work with cropping in Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, and Lightroom CC. Alright, well we have this image here, and one of the ways that we can crop a photograph, we know, is with the crop tool, but what some people may not be aware of is you can use the marquee tool, and click and drag over an area of the image, then after having done that, go to image, and choose crop, and it will crop to that area.

Let me undo that, and talk about another technique that you could use. Another one is to use the marquee tool to drag out an area, then just choose the crop tool, that will convert your marquee into a crop area, you can see that right here. Then we could fine-tune that, or modify it, however really we wanted too, like this, and apply that crop by double clicking to apply it. Now, to reactivate the crop area in Photoshop, just click with the crop tool again, and it will reactivate that crop, as long as you have delete crop pixels turn off, which is what I recommend you do.

Now, what about those situations where you want to change the orientation? This is vertical, I want it to be horizontal. That, you just press the X key, the X is the one which allows you to flip-flop that, and then, of course, you could drag your crop area around, and I think this image actually would be kind of cool to crop in really tight to it like that, so that we have a nice closeup view of our subject here in this beautiful tree. Alright, well that's Photoshop, let's jump to another tool, here we'll jump over to Lightroom CC.

In Lightroom CC, we can press the C key, that gives us access to our crop tool. Same shortcut as Photoshop, and the other shortcut works as well, that X key that allows us to flip-flop that orientation, let me make this a little more exaggerated, so you can see this here. This works if we have a really big crop area, too, and here you can see as I extend this out, and then hit the X key, it's going to keep its orientation, then we can double click to apply that crop.

I think I like this one, this crop actually, this photograph even better. Okay, let's go to Lightroom Classic just to finish off the conversation. Here in Lightroom Classic, the shortcut key is the R key, that's the key which opens up our crop tool, and what you can do with this one as well, is hit the X key to flip-flop those, so works just like it does before. And then, to apply the crop in any of these applications, you can double click inside of the crop area, and that will then apply the crop to the photograph.

And the reason why I wanted to show all three of these tools is people are starting to use multiple tools, and I wanted to highlight how most of the shortcuts overlap between the various tools, and how those shortcuts can help you crop and compose your images even more quickly. Well, that wraps up this week's episode, thanks for joining me, have a great day. See you next time.