From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Designing with Grids and Guides

The rule of thirds crop overlay - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Designing with Grids and Guides

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The rule of thirds crop overlay

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- [Instructor] In this chapter, I'd like to talk about Photoshop's different crop grid overlays. So cropping is really a very important aspect of creating a well-composed image. And when you do so, you have the option of viewing these different crop overlays. If I choose my crop tool, that places a bounding rectangle around my image. And then if I click on the image, I see whatever is the current grid overlay, assuming, that is, that I have always show overlay checked. I can cycle through these different overlays by pressing the o key. Now in this movie, I'm going to talk about the first and most widely used of these overlays, the rule of thirds. This divides your image into three rows and three columns. And the objective here is to place the focal point of the image at lines of grid intersection. And that hopefully results in a better-composed image. So in this image, I have this poppy in the center. And I think it would be a more interesting composition if this were offset. So I'm going to crop the image, now I'm going to maintain the aspect ratio while I crop the image, by holding down the shift key. That isn't essential, that's just my preference. I'm also going to uncheck, delete cropped pixels, so that my crop is non-destructive and I can recompose the crop at any time. So I'll move to the top-left, and I'll hold down my shift key, and I'm going to place my grid intersection at about here, relative to this poppy. And I might want just a little bit more space above it, let's perhaps crop in from the bottom-left. And now I'll press return or enter to commit to the crop. So to see the before and after, I'll press command or control-Z. I will just have to fit the original to window. So that's where we started. And that is where I'm ending up, with the rule of thirds crop. A second example, this time on a vertical image. I'll choose the crop tool, click on the image if necessary, press the o key to cycle through the different crop overlays. And here, I would like to offset the bird, I'll place that bird at the grid intersections, something like that. So that's the the cropped version. Once again, I'll fit to window, and then press command or control-Z, to see the before, which I'll also fit to window. Keep in mind that all of these crop overlays are just suggestions. One or other might be preferable for certain types of images. But each will give you a different way of approaching the crop. So next, I'm going to move on to the second of our overlays, the grid, which is useful for straightening images.

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