Photoshop Tip: Cropping with Guidelines.

Posted by Pixelhead

Here is a basic easy tip for cropping with Photoshop. Many times in the past all I would do to crop out a piece of a picture would be to click on the crop tool, click on the picture and drag the cursor so that the crop box would include everything or nearly everything I wanted cropped. Often times though this is not very accurate.

Cropped Red Chairs

An Easy Cropping Solution.

Lizzie showed me how to use the guidelines sometime ago, and since I discovered them, I have used them almost every time I want to crop.

In order to use guidelines you need to have the rulers on. Go to the view tab and click “Rulers” or just use the shortcut “CTR R” which will enable the rulers.

Grab The Guidelines

Next put your cursor in the ruler at the top or side, click and drag the ruler over to the edge of part of the picture you Couch with Guidlines want to crop. Do it again to create the other side of the crop box. Then grab the opposite ruler and do the other two sides. Now that you have the area defined, click either the rectangular marquee or the elliptical marquee tool. Click at the top of your area marked off by the guidelines and drag down until the entire area for the rectangular marquee is selected or until the elliptical crop selection fills the box. The crop tool will use the guidelines, so your cropping selection will be much more accurate.

Release the cursor then CTRL X or CTRL C > CTRL N >CTRL V. Then go to the Layer tab at the top of the screen, select “flatten image”. Then you can save the cropped pic as a new pic and you are ready to use your cropped picture.

What Tips Do You Have?

I hope this little tip is something you can use. If you have some other Photoshop tips for me, please leave a comment as I am eager to learn new Photoshop tips. This can include links to Photoshop tutorials you may have done.

Written by Pixelhead on November 30th, 2007 with 17 comments.
Read more articles on Blogging and Photoshop and Tutorials

Blog Comments – How to Leave Blog Comments that Get Published (February 19th, 2010)
JS:Small-c Virus Alert (February 10th, 2010)
Blogging Essentials Intro (December 15th, 2009)
Laptop Repair and Clothier (September 2nd, 2009)
Win a Membership to OnlineProfits.com (January 14th, 2009)

17 comments

Read the comments left by other users below, or:

perros
#1. December 1st, 2007, at 7:46 PM.

I always wondered how to get my pictures to crop like that. This is kinda cool, pretty soon I will be a photoshop master. This is totally a photoshop tutorial I can use.

Murali
#2. December 3rd, 2007, at 2:55 PM.

Just started using photoshop and find yours an useful tip. The below link give few more Photoshop Tips.
http://www.mediacollege.com/adobe/photoshop/

Forrest
#3. December 4th, 2007, at 3:21 AM.

I tend to use the rectangular marquee, and then Image -> Crop. I know you can tell the crop tool not to resample your image ( say to 72 or 300 ppi ), but … once bitten, twice shy. Also, with the marque/selection tool, you can tell it to use a ‘constrained aspect ratio’ ( at least in CS 2, but they change the wording a little with each new version ) to make sure you get the right shape to make a 4×6, 5×7, 8×10, or any other frame.

Pixelhead
#4. December 4th, 2007, at 2:32 PM.

It seems like there are tons of ways to do almost every task you have. Next I want to master editing Red Eye with it.

Steve Sewell
#5. December 7th, 2007, at 8:14 PM.

Thanks for the the interesting tips, I am just starting to get to grips with Photoshop and every bit of help is most welcome.

Steve

Christian
#6. December 9th, 2007, at 3:03 PM.

Thank you for these tips, I will chack them immediately.

Forrest
#7. December 24th, 2007, at 11:21 PM.

As I’m working on some photos from Olympic National Park, I realized there’s a step I probably didn’t mention here … and sure enough, I didn’t.

If you use the marquee tool – drag a selection, then use the crop command from the image menu, hide the selection right afterwards. That’s control H in Windows. Then hit undo a few times to compare the before/after without the marching ants as a distraction.

Alfred
#8. December 28th, 2007, at 8:55 PM.

This helps, when i try cropping for some reason photoshop snaps to the ends of the photo, its wierd

Andy
#9. January 18th, 2008, at 4:41 PM.

Using the guidelines let us to do a more precise work. Thanks for the useful tuttorial.

Travis
#10. April 26th, 2008, at 8:59 AM.

Cropping is nice, but have you used the magic wand tool in adobe? I think that’s when the true fun begins (remembers putting my roommate’s face on a herpes ad for april fools )

bhutan web hosting
#11. June 17th, 2008, at 7:11 AM.

Thanks for the tip. Should ease out some of my photoshop work next time I do some cropping.
You should write more tips/tutorials esp. photoshop.

bhutan web hosting

andy
#12. June 28th, 2008, at 3:53 AM.

Thank you for the tip. I am going to try this tommorrow during some of my editing. Its funny how many ways there are to do things in photoshop

martil
#13. November 11th, 2008, at 12:03 AM.

I am going to take a shot at this. Photoshop can be rather baffling so thank you very much for this nice clear tip. Much cleaner and more efficient when cropping, thank you very much.

Sharmane
#14. March 4th, 2009, at 2:29 PM.

Amazing how many different methods there are to accomplishing a certain task with photoshop. Helpful cropping tip, worth a bookmark!

stuart
#15. March 5th, 2009, at 7:34 AM.

If you want more control use Masks. It provides more flexibility if you want to adjust your image or you want to manipulate the original image. Once you cropped the original image that part of the info is lost.

Matt
#16. September 5th, 2009, at 11:22 PM.

Excellent article, thanks! I found some great Photoshop stuff here;
http://www.divknowledge.com
They have Photoshop tutorials and news!
Matt

gry
#17. September 20th, 2009, at 2:34 PM.

I read a few tutorials of cropping pictures but this is one of the simplest and gives great results. BIG thanks!

Appropriate Comments Welcomed

If you want to leave your comment on this article, simply fill out the form below. One link limit per comment and only if appropriate, and comments should be relevant. Please make sure you have read our Commentators guidelines.:

You can use these XHTML tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> .