The Adobe Photoshop CS6 Book for Digital Photographers
Creating Your Own Custom Crop Tools
Although it’s more of an advanced technique, creating your own custom tools isn’t complicated. In fact, once you set them up, they will save you time and money. We’re going to create what are called “tool presets.” These tool presets are a series of tools (in this case, Crop tools) with all our option settings already in place so, we can create a 5x7", 6x4", or whatever size Crop tool we want. Then, when we want to crop to 5x7", all we have to do is grab the 5x7" Crop tool preset. Here’s how:
Step One: Press the letter C to switch to the Crop tool, and then go under the Window menu and choose Tool Presets to bring up the Tool Presets panel. You’ll find that five Crop tool presets are already there. (Make sure that the Current Tool Only checkbox is turned on at the bottom of the panel, so you’ll see only the Crop tool’s presets, and not the presets for every tool.)
Step Two: Go up to the Options Bar and enter the dimensions for the first tool you want to create (in this example, we’ll create a Crop tool that crops to a wallet-size image). In the Width field, enter 2 in, then press the Tab key to jump to the Height field, enter 2.5 in, and press Return (PC: Enter). Note: If you want to include the resolution in your tool preset, go to the pop-up menu at the left end of the Options Bar, and choose Size & Resolution. Enter your Height, Width, and Resolution in the dialog that appears, and click OK.
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Chapter 5
How to Resize and Crop Photos