How To Do A 100% Crop

[Andrew Larkin]

When you select the crop tool in Photoshop, the toolbar (just below the menu bar) will change to show settings for your crop.

There are three boxes you should fill in:
* Width - the width of the image you want for your web page in pixels
* Height - the height of the image you want
* Resolution - set to 72 pixels/inch

Now when you drag the crop tool across your image, it will be constrained to the proportions you set width/height.  When you complete the crop, the resulting image will be exactly the dimensions you entered.

This is the simplest approach I use and will resample the image to suit.

If you don't want any resampling to occur, select the magnifying glass tool, click the "Actual Pixels" button on the tool bar, then crop what you can see without putting values in any of the crop settings (or click the "Clear" toolbar button when the crop tool is selected to reset values you may previously of selected.)

If you have the "Info" palette visible while you do the crop, it will show the width/height of your crop selection as you drag the mouse.

Andrew

[eddieg1]

if I have a photo of a family reunion and I want to crop so that only my head is in the image to be posted on the WWW...and my camera is a 20D having resolution of 3504x2336 in raw...and in photoshop I crop so that my head is 3x4 inch, then what should the ppi setting be in PSCS in order to achieve an image where each pixel of the image is represented by 1 pixel on the monitor?
My second question is...is that the definition of a 100% crop...that each pixel of the image is represented by one pixel on the monitor?

[Jonathan Wienke]

what should the ppi setting be in PSCS in order to achieve an image where each pixel of the image is represented by 1 pixel on the monitor?
My second question is...is that the definition of a 100% crop...that each pixel of the image is represented by one pixel on the monitor?

1. Your view setting in Photoshop has absolutely nothing to do with PPI. You can view any image at 100% regardless of its size or PPI setting.

2. Absolutely not. See #1. a "100% crop" simply means that you crop a section out of an image without up- or downsizing it; the number of pixels in the cropped section are the same before and after the crop. To do this with photoshop's crop tool, leave the PPI box blank, or you will be resizing as you crop and it won't be a 100% crop any more.

For web images, the only relevant image measurement is pixels. Inches or centimeters are totally irrelevant. Read http://www.visual-vacations.com/Photography/digital_dpi.htm for more info.