From Eric Miller,
Your Guide to Graphic Design.
FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!

The crop tool is also handy for resizing images, without using the “Image>Image Size…” command. With the crop tool still selected, notice the toolbar at the top of your screen has blank fields for width, height and resolution (pictured). You can fill these fields in with dimensions of your choice, then crop the image to immediately resize it to those dimensions. For example, enter a width of “300 px” and a height of “200 px” with a resolution of “72.” Try to crop your photo and notice the aspect ratio is stuck to fit your dimensions. Finish the crop and you have a 72 dpi 300x200 photo. Here you are achieving both a crop and a resize in one step. You can also fill in only one or two of these fields, allowing you to crop photos to a specific width or height and let the other dimension work out for itself.

You can also enter inches by using the abbreviation “in” instead of “px.” This is helpful for cropping a photo to a common size for printing, such as 4x6 inches at 300 dpi. Remember you don’t actually have to crop anything out of your photo to use this resize function…simply enter your dimensions and select the entire image with your crop tool, and it will still be resized. Be careful about selecting dimensions that are larger than your actual photo, which would result in a loss of image quality.