USING THE CROP TOOL

The Crop tool is hidden away beneath the Marquee tools at the top left corner of the toolbox.

To select the Crop tool, click and hold on the Marquee tools icon to bring up several hidden tools, including the Crop tool at the very end. Drag across to the Crop tool and release the mouse. The quickest way to access the Crop tool is to just hit the C key.

Drag across your image from the top left to the lower right and then release the mouse. A Crop Marquee should appear. It looks like a box of dashed lines with tiny boxes in each corner that serve as handles. The area inside of this box is your Crop Selection. When you apply the crop, everything outside of the box is cut away :

You can adjust your crop selection in several ways:

• Drag a box handle to increase or decrease the size of the Crop marquee.
• To constrain proportions (increase or decrease width and height in an exact ratio to one another), hold down the Shift key as you drag a corner box handle.
• To move the Crop marquee to a new location, put your cursor inside the selection box and simply drag it to a new location.
• You can also rotate the Crop marquee. This is handy for straightening images and fixing crooked horizons (See the tip, Cropping to Straighten a Crooked Image). Just position the cursor outside the Crop marquee and the cursor will change into a curved set of arrows. Click, hold, and drag up or down to rotate the Crop marquee.
• To stop the Crop Marquee from snapping to the outer edge an image, hold down the Control key.

Once the Crop marquee is where you want it, double-click inside the marquee to crop, or just hit the Return key (Enter key for Windows). If you decide that you don't want to apply the crop after all, press the Escape key. The Crop marquee will disappear. If you apply the crop and then decide you don't like the results, select Undo Crop from the Edit Menu or use the keyboard command shortcut Command Z (Control Z for Windows).