Photoshop CS4: The Missing Manual

Chapter 6. Cropping, Resizing, and Rotating

Cropping and resizing your images 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. 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 an image, print it, or post it on a Web site. Cropping is pretty straightforward; 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 Straightening images.) 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 ways of cropping in both Photoshop and Camera Raw (a powerful photo-correcting application that’s installed with Photoshop—see Chapter 9). You’ll also discover how to resize images without—and this is crucial—losing image quality. Perhaps most important, you’ll understand once and for all what resolution really is, when it matters, and how to change it without trashing your image. Finally, you’ll spend some quality playtime with the Transform commands.

Cropping Images

There’s a reason professional photos look so darn good. Besides being shot with fancy cameras and benefiting from a lot of post-processing ...