Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Cropping, Resizing, and Rotating

Cropping and resizing affect your entire document (not just the active layer), and are among the most basic edits you’ll ever make—but they’re also among the most important. A bad crop (or no crop) can ruin an image, while a good crop can improve it tenfold by snipping away useless or distracting material. And knowing how to resize an image—by changing either its file size or its overall dimensions—can be crucial when it’s time to email the image, print it, or post it on a website.

Cropping is pretty straightforward (though the process has changed from how it worked in earlier versions of Photoshop); resizing, not so much. To resize an image correctly, you first need to understand the relationship between pixels and resolution—and how they affect image quality (that can of worms gets opened on Pixels and Resolution.) And if you want to make Photoshop resize your image’s background without touching its subject or focal point, the Content-Aware Scale command can do that, but there’s a trick to using it successfully. Rotating images, on the other hand, is just plain fun.

In this chapter, you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know about cropping, from general guidelines to the many way to crop (and straighten) in both Photoshop and Camera Raw (a powerful photo-correcting application that comes with Photoshop—see Chapter 9). Perhaps most important, you’ll understand once and for all what resolution really is and when it matters.

You’ll also ...