Using the crop tool to it’s full potential

November 9, 2007 by Daniel | Filed Under Photography, Photoshop, Tutorial 

The Crop Tool in Photoshop is more useful than most people know. At the same time as you crop the image you can rotate it and correct the perspective aswell.

This image has lots of perspective and is also a bit rotated. By making a crop selection and clicking and draging outside the selection, it can be rotated and cropped in one action.

Press Enter or click the commit button to crop the image. You should get something like below.

The image is now rotated, but if you want you can also correct the perspective at the same time, with the Crop Tool. In this image the perspective looks nice, so normally we wouldn’t correct it, but just for the sake of demonstration we will. To correct the perspective you make the vertical lines, which are now converging upwards, parallell.

First make a crop selection in your image, then check the Perspective checkbox in the top toolbar. You can now move around the corners of the selection individually. You want to make the left and right edges of the selection line up with the lines in the image like below. By holding Shift when moving the handles you can make sure the horizontal edges stay horizontal.

Then use the middle handles of the selection to enlarge it.

Then make the crop and we are done. The image now has parallell vertical lines, something that a tilt-shift lens would accomplish.

The image is degraded more the less parallell the lines are, so it gives the best results if you try to keep the vertical lines as parallell as possible when shooting. A wide angle lens typically gives lines that converge more, so if possible use the longest lense you have when you know you will be correcting the perspective.

Daniel

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