Adobe Photoshop Logo

In Adobe Photoshop, it'south easy to speedily crop an image into a non-rectangular shape such as a circle, which can come in handy when visualizing circular social media headshots. Here's how to do it.

First, open up the epitome that y'all desire to crop with Photoshop on your Mac or Windows computer. In the Photoshop window, find the "Layers" panel, which is located in the sidebar on the right. In the Layers console, find the "Background" layer and click the lock icon side by side to it. If there's no lock icon, you don't take to exercise anything.

Annotation: If you don't run into the Layers console, click "Window" in the card bar and select "Layers."

In the vertical toolbar, correct-click the Marquee Tool icon (that looks similar a rectangle with a dotted outline) and select "Elliptical Marquee Tool."

Select the Elliptical Marquee Tool on the Photoshop window

Now that the elliptical selection tool is activated, hold downwardly the Shift key and employ your mouse or trackpad to draw a perfect circle outline over the surface area that you lot desire to crop in your photo. If you don't use the Shift key, you'll draw an ellipse.

Make a circle selection on your photo in the Photoshop window

Subsequently you make the selection, right-click the selected area on your photograph and click "Select Changed." This selects everything in your photo except for the circled area.

Click Select Inverse from Photoshop's context menu

If you use Windows, press the Backspace key. If you're on Mac, press the Delete key. This removes the surface area that's outside the circle in your photo.

Circled photo in Photoshop

Your photo even so has a lot of unused area around it. To remove this area, click Paradigm > Trim in the Photoshop card bar.

Trim option in Photoshop's Image menu

In the Trim window, select "Transparent Pixels" in the "Based On" section. And then, make sure that all the boxes in the "Trim Away" section are checked, and click "OK."

Remove transparent pixels from Photoshop's Trim window

The canvas size of the image will be reduced to simply the circumvolve portion that you cropped out of the image.

A circle-shaped image in Photoshop

To save this epitome, click File > Save As in the menu bar.

Select Save As from Photoshop's File menu

In the Salvage As window, select "PNG" from the "Format" bill of fare. The PNG format preserves transparency (which your circle-shaped photo uses), simply JPEG doesn't.

Save an image with Photoshop's save window

Then, enter a name for your photo, select a folder to save information technology in, and click "Salvage" at the bottom of the window. That'southward information technology!

RELATED: What's the Difference Between JPG, PNG, and GIF?


The in a higher place commodity may comprise affiliate links, which assist back up How-To Geek.