How to Crop and Resize Photos Simultaneously With Adobe Photoshop

If you're preparing graphics for the web, you'll need to reduce the resolution of the image in order to make it fit a standard page. In addition, you may want a square photo or an oblong one. Luckily, you can take care of cropping and resizing at the same time in Adobe Photoshop.

Instructions

1. Open your image in Photoshop and notice the blue description bar at the top of the frame. It contains the name of your image and the current size, percentage wise. Use your "Zoom" tool to enlarge or reduce the image to 100 percent for a correct representation of the size of the image.

2. Click on the "Crop" tool in the tool bar and your cursor will turn into a square with the ends overlapping. Experiment by clicking and dragging over your image to familiarize yourself with the tool. Press the "Escape" key to cancel the function.

3. Pull on the corner handles of the selection box to resize the area within the cropped region, making it larger or smaller. In this manner, you can make your final image as wide or narrow as your choose.

4. Select a predetermined size by choosing the "Crop" tool and then keying in the width and height of your desired image in the menu bar that appears at the top of the page.

5. Choose the correct resolution for your final image. For printing, leave the resolution set at a high number but for web use, key in the number "72," which corresponds with the standard resolution used on the Internet.

6. Pick a measurement that uses pixels per inch or pixels per centimeter at the far right hand side of the menu bar. Choosing a larger resolution will make your image larger.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't crop and resize your image until you complete any necessary color, saturation or levels adjustments. Once you lower the resolution, the image may not contain enough data to modify accurately.