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. 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.

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).

CROPPING TO STRAIGHTEN A CROOKED IMAGE

With the Crop tool selected, drag across your image from the top left to lower right, and then release the mouse. Don't worry about including the area you wish to crop inside the crop boundaries just yet. When you release the mouse, the Crop marquee (selection) appears. By grabbing a marquee handle, you can change the height and width of the crop selection.

You can also rotate the Crop marquee. Just position the cursor outside the Crop marquee and the cursor will change into a curved arrow. Click, hold, and drag up or down to rotate the Crop marquee. When trying to straighten an image, the best way is to first reduce the size of your Crop marquee using the crop marquee handles, and then rotate the marquee so the top, horizontal border of the marquee is aligned with your horizon:

Using the crop marquee handles, extend the Crop marquee so that it encompasses all of the area in the image you wish to keep. All of the area outside of the Crop marquee will be cut away. Note that you will lose some physical image height and width:

To straighten and crop the image, double-click inside the Crop marquee or just hit the Return key (Enter key for Windows). You should now have an image with a straight horizon:

If you don't like the way your crop turned out, just Undo the action by selecting Undo from the File Menu or use the shortcut Command Z (Control Z for Windows).