Does anyone know if there is a way to lock the aspect ratio of the crop tool so that whenever you change the size of the crop rectangle, that it will remain at a specified aspect ratio? This would be very helpful for cropping pictures to print on a particular paper size. Any help would be appreciated.
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Jim, you can also use the Rectangular Marquee in Fixed Aspect Ratio style to perform crops; as a matter of fact, a lot of us prefer it to the Crop tool. Both will do the job, however.
There have been two recent threads which have covered this topic fairly thoroughtly.
Find the threads titled:
"Cropping Pictures to a certain pixel size" and "How Does One Pre-Size & Crop?"
Briefly, though, with the Crop tool selected, enter your desired Width and Height values in the appropriate fields on the Options bar.
You may also do the same thing with the Rectangular Marquee tool, by setting it’s Style to "Fixed Aspect Ratio", but this tool does not allow for re-sizing the selection after you have released the click-drag.
Read through the other threads to get a lot of information with regard to the consequences of using either tool so that you can pick whichever method suits your desired end results.
This topic seems to keep surfacing, and it always stimulates a rather lively discussion from "opposing" points of view. But after you have chosen the crop tool from the tool palette, near the top of your screen you will see input boxes were you can specify your height and width in either cm or inches. If you enter specific dimensions, and then the crop tool will behave the way you want it to in this situation. If you also put in a specific resolution, which is another option, it will cause your image to be resampled which may or may not be desired. Because of this particular "feature" of the crop tool, some people recommend using the rectangular marquee tool and changing it from normal to fixed size or fixed aspect ratio. Personally, I prefer to use the crop tool, but I seem to be in the minority. If you decide in the future that you want to freely crop and image and not be constrained by your dimensions, then you should hit the Clear button that you will see near the top of your screen.
I would add the caution to others with your procedure that when working with a file from say a 2M camera, undesirable results may be obtained if selecting a rather small portion of the image for enlargement. This is not a criticism of your methods, whatever works for someone is the way to go, but you do begin with large files which reduces the poor quality printout possibility.
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