SFredrickPhoto.com Blog

Anyone who has taken any of  my image editing classes knows I’m a strong proponent of nondestructive editing in Photoshop. And I’m always surprised by the number of experienced Photoshop users that don’t know it’s possible to do a nondestructive crop. So I thought I would do a post to show how simple it is.

First off, some basics. In the default Photoshop workspace the Tools panel is a vertical bar on the left. This bar hold all the tools, including the Crop Tool.  And across the top of the workspace, just below the menu bar, is the Options Bar. Every tool has a unique Options bar that lets you set various options to determine how the tool will behave. And the Crop Tool is a little unique in that it’s Option Bar changes after a crop outline is made. Here is what the Crop Tool’s Option Bar looks like when the tool is selected but before a corp outline is made:

And here is what it looks like after a crop outline is made:

Here there are two radial buttons that determines what happens to the pixels outside the crop outline after the crop is committed. The default behavior is Delete; the other possibility is Hide. Most people never change the default behavior of deleting the pixels outside the crop outline. But if you change this setting to Hide, the pixels outside the crop outline will only be hidden from view.

In order to get the pixels back you need to do a Image > Reveal All. One down side is after you commit the Crop, the two options result in the same view, the image with the new crop applied. That is, you get no visual indication that there is pixel information in the image file that is not being shown. So you have to remember that you cropped the  image and then remember to do an Image > Reveal All to see that information.

An obvious disadvantage of the Hide options is that, because the pixels are still really there, the file size does not change. So if you really know you will NEVER want to go back and use some or all of the cropped pixels using the Delete option will save some disk space. But if you are not sure about the crop then keep you options open (pun not intended) and crop nondestructively by changing to the Hide mode.