Photoshop is a great image editing and manipulating tool, and I think we all can agree on that. However, for those who haven’t yet spent their nights staring at their monitors in frustration, Photoshop can be a bit of an annoyance as well, especially when talking about cropping here.

Suppose you’re working on a design and you have a hundred effects and layers going on; suddenly you realise that you need to crop something on a layer a little bit. The instinct would be to select that layer and reach out for the crop tool, right? Mine certainly was and guess what? I was absolutely wrong.

The crop tool will crop the whole image. If you’re looking to crop a single layer on Photoshop while working on multiple, here is how you can do that.

Also read: 65 Photoshop keyboard shortcuts to make your workflow quicker

How to crop a single layer in Photoshop?

Aforementioned, the crop tool is useless when it comes to cropping layers. Here’s we’re going to have to use layer masks.

Step 1: Fire up Photoshop and load up your design. I’m going to use a business card design that I made for this article.

Step 2: Select the layer you want to crop. I’m selecting the second layer, where our logo is, and I’ll be trying to crop that.

Step 3: Select the Rectangular Marquee tool and select the area you’d like to crop from the layer. You can use any other selection tool that you’d like.

Step 4: After you’ve made your selection, go to Select > Inverse. This will select all pixels that are outside your selection.

Step 5: To remove the unwanted part, go to Edit and then select Clear. This will remove all selected pixels on the layer except the ones we selected in step 2 and give an effect similar to that of cropping.