Digital Slimdown, Part 3, Cropping the Edges
For Digital Scrapbookers
by Jen White

You cannot see the pixels that are hanging off the edges of your document. So does that mean they are not there?

Unless you are an extremely clean and straightforward scrapper who avoids the edges of your document at all costs, there are pixels beyond the edges. And even though they cannot be seen, don’t think they are harmless. They are still counted in the data that makes up the file size of your document.

Here’s the short of it: Crop your document; it will save file space.

I’ll show you how this works using this layered document with several edge clusters. I forgot to crop it, so it will be a good example.

How To Tell If You Are Past the Edges

• Open a multi-layered document.
• In the Layers panel, click on the top layer to activate it.
• Holding down the Shift key, click on the layer directly above the locked Background layer. Now all layers, except the Background layer, in the layers panel should be active.
• Press Ctrl T (Mac: Cmd T) to get the Transform options.
• Press Ctrl 0 (Mac: Cmd 0) to fit the bounding box to your viewing area.
  NOTE: The 0 is a zero.

I did that to my above scrapbook page, and here’s the result:

• The blue rectangle above is my document’s bounding box. It shows the boundary of the active layers. (Pay no attention to the blue path around the journaling.)
• See all that empty white space between the bounding box and the document’s edges? Those are pixels extending past the edge of the document. You don’t see those extending pixels because Photoshop is designed to only show you pixels within the document’s boundaries.

Here’s the bad news: Even though you cannot see those extending pixels, Photoshop still keeps track of them; therefore, they count as part of the file size of your document.

Do you need those extending pixels? If you’re done editing, then NO!

CAUTION: I do not crop my documents until I know I’m done editing.

How To Crop the Edges of Your Document

TIP: First, save your original document and make a note of its file size. To find the size of your document, look in a Finder or Explorer window.

• Open a multi-layered document.
• Press Ctrl A (Mac: Cmd A) to select the entire document. (This never includes extending pixels.)
• In the Menu Bar, choose Image > Crop.
• Press Ctrl D (Mac: Cmd D) to deselect.

Now, save your document (File > Save) and look at the file size again.

Here’s how mine turned out:

CAUTION! If you have a document that contains a stroke layer style that travels off the edge, you will need to add an extra step!

PROBLEM: Cropping a document that contains extending stroke layer styles will result broken strokes. For example:

SOLUTION: If this applies to you (you have stroke layer styles extending past the edges of your document), then you will need to rasterize (or simplify) those stroke layer styles before cropping your document.

How To Rasterize or Simplify a Stroke Layer Style

• Open a document with a stroke layer style.
• In the Layers panel, click on a layer with a stroke layer style applied.
• In the panel menu, choose Simplify Layer (PS: Rasterize Layer Style).
  NOTE: Rasterizing or simplifying a layer will make that layer non-editable.

Now you can crop the edges of your document using the instructions above.

✅ Do you normally check to see if you have extending pixels on your document? Use the instructions above to check a few of your documents.
✅ If you slim down a document by cropping it, let me know how many megabytes you saved in a comment below.

Digital Slimdown Series:
Part 1: Moving from PSD to TIFF
Part 2: Deleting Hidden Layers
Part 3: Cropping the Edges
Part 4: Merging Masks

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Author: Jen White | Contact Us
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