Cropping Your Photos

1. One of the easiest ways to crop your photos and to be able to instantly try on different aspect ratios and crops is by creating a clipping mask. Start by opening up a photo and dragging it onto your page.

2. Create a rectangle on the layer underneath your photo and “clip” the photo to it. This can be done by selecting Layer>Clipping Mask from the pull down menu or by pressing the shortcut key, Alt-Ctrl-G, while in your photo layer. Don’t worry if you get something odd, we will fix that in the next step.

3. Next, select the rectangle layer and the Move tool from the toolbar. Boxes will occur at the four corners of the rectangle. Click and drag on these handles until you find a crop for your photo that you like. In this example, I cropped the left side of my photo to get rid of some distracting white areas in the photograph and to move the subject’s eyes closer to the third points of the photograph.

4. This same technique may be used with any of the custom shapes, such as this postage stamp shape, found in Photoshop or with any other layer in your file. Try clipping your photo to text, to layers with a funky shaped edge, or to a premade photo mask in a creative shape.