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.
There you go. Now we have a weirdly cropped Candid.Technology logo.
Also read: How to fix rough edges in Photoshop?
Someone who writes/edits/shoots/hosts all things tech and when he’s not, streams himself racing virtual cars.
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