This tutorial will instruct you to crop a layer. It combines the lessons of two previous tutorials: Basic Cropping and Basic Selections.
- First, select the layer that you would like to crop in the layers palette. If the layers palette is not visible, go to Window > Layers.
- Select the part of the layer that you wish to keep. To do this, draw a marquee around this area with the selection tool. (A marquee is the rectangle of dashes that delineates a selected area). Here, a marquee is drawn around the elephant so the extraneous field in the background can be cropped away.
- The Photoshop function Select Inverse allows the user to select everything outside of the original selection. While a portion of the layer is selected, go to Select > Inverse and right click the selected and click Select > Inverse. The keyboard shortcut for this is Shift+Command+I. The new selection will be indicated by a marquee around the border of canvas and another around the original selection. The selected area is now the unwanted field: the area between the border of the canvas and the edge of the original selection.
- Now that the unwanted field is selected, it can be easily deleted: press the Delete button on the keyboard. The only part of the layer that remains is the original selection. De-select everything by clicking outside the selection or by pressing Command+D. The elephant can now be easily be moved or adjusted.
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