To Crop or Not to Crop

Hello and welcome back to another Tuesday Top Tip, those little things in Photoshop that are sometimes over looked, yet can be so very handy.

This week a quick look at the crop tool. There’s a option in there for a non destructive crop, here’s where;

For those that are new to Photoshop, the crop tool looks like this;

and is used by clicking and dragging the area you wish to keep. Dragging outside the image will automatically snap to the image. That’s what I’ve done here;

By clicking on one of the sizing handles I can resize the box to the area I want to keep. The grey part is what I am going to loose.

That is unless I go up to the menu bar and click the “Hide” radio button. As the name suggests, this doesn’t delete anything.

To do this you musy be on an unlocked layer – Thanks Jeremy (See comments)

Now I haven’t lost any of the image I can press Ctrl+T on a PC or Cmd+T on the Mac to transform the layer individually

Bonus Tip : Making the crop bigger than the canvas size by dragging out the handles will make the canvas the size of your crop.