This will cause the original selection to become deselected and everything outside to become selected.įinally, hit the delete key to remove the selection. Next, go to the Selection menu and click on Inverse. You can use the lasso tool, polygonal lasso tool, magnetic lasso tool, rectangular marquee tool, or even the magic wand tool to select part of an image. Make sure the layer you wish to crop is selected, and use any of the marquee tools to select the part of the layer that you want to preserve. The simplest way to crop a layer is to just use the marquee tool. If you’re looking for a Photoshop course that covers nearly everything, this one by Ben Willmore is worth checking out. You can always double click on the layer mask itself in the Layers Panel to reveal just the mask, which you can further fine tune with a brush or pencil tool. Anything outside the selection will go black in the layer mask, revealing whatever is below it. If you don’t want to paint, you can make a selection, and while the selection is active, press the layer mask button. Remember, you’re not actually messing with the layer, you’re just kind of under/overlaying a stencil. White is used to show the layer mask, and black is used to erase it. As you paint black, you’ll see that instead of black, the layers below start to get exposed.
Now you can use the paint brush tool and just paint black over any part of the layer that you want to remove. When you click the button, you’ll see two things in the Layers panel. Simply select the layer that you want to crop, and in the bottom of the Layers panel, there is a button that looks like a little frame.
It may sound daunting if you’re a beginner with Photoshop, but it’s actually really easy to do and very intuitive to use. There’s another way to “crop” part of a layer whilst preserving it, and that’s by using a Layer Mask. While the marquee tool method is effective, it’s not the best because you actually have to remove the layer data and you may need to use that later. Alternatively, make a selection and press the layer mask button to make everything outside the selection will go in the mask Solution 1: Use a layer mask.
How to crop a layer in Photoshop: Quick Steps What if you just want to crop a single layer and preserve the others? You may want to do this to get part of a background to show, or to eliminate some extraneous details from a top layer. This is because cropping simply reduces the overall canvas size – it’s a visual version of the canvas size adjustment. So that means even if you have 10 different layers, the crop tool is just going to crop everything from the top layer all the way down to the bottom. If you mouse over the crop tool in Photoshop, you’ll notice that it’s actually an image crop tool, not just a layer crop. In this Photoshop crop layer tutorial, we’ll look at 2 methods that you can use to crop layers and discuss which method is superior on the whole. One issue that many folks run into with Adobe Photoshop is how to crop a single layer.