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Automated Close Cropping

Here's another handy method of cropping that doesn't use the Crop tool, and best of all, Photoshop does most of the work. It's used for situations where you want blank areas surrounding your image to be cropped away—perfect for product shots, tight cropping of Web graphics, or whenever you want your photo cropped as tightly as possible.

Step One. Open the image you want to be “close cropped.” In the example shown here, we have a product shot surrounded by white space.
Step Two. Go under the Image menu and choose Trim.
Step Three. When the Trim dialog box appears, you can choose where you want the trimming (cropping) to occur (from the Top, Bottom, Left, or Right). By default, it trims away blank areas from all sides. This is also where you tell Photoshop which color to trim away. In this case, the area to be trimmed away is white, so using the default “Top Left Pixel Color” works just fine. In fact, 99% of the time, I don't change a single setting.
Step Four. When you click OK, the photo will be close cropped (trimmed) down to the smallest possible size without deleting any non-white pixels (as shown here).

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