zackw

I didn't say invalid, I'm saying use a majority, or more "common" way of speaking. After all, Affinity made up the word "unclip" exactly to refer to "growing" in contrast to "clip" which clearly is meant for "shrinking". But if "clip" means "eh, maybe grow, maybe shrink", then what is "unclip"? "Maybe not grow, maybe not shrink?" No, it only "maybe grows", but not the reverse. I'm saying, keep the language clear. Rather than have a tool called "clip" which does either/or, it should be renamed "Fix Canvas" or something which more generically means it might grow or it might shrink. When I have a document with lots of layers and objects and things, I don't always know offhand if any objects might happen to be out of bounds, but when I use clip canvas, I darn well ONLY mean, "let's shrink this canvas if it needs it." Imagine having the words "right" and "left", but then someone says "right can also mean left, but left only means left". That's how I view this.

It would seem the overwhelming majority of definitions are that clipping as a verb is to remove or make smaller. I rest my case. Affinity, pay attention!

They are very handy, and make a lot more sense to me now. But what we need now is a "clip to crop" command that destroys everything off-canvas at once. At least, everything rasterized at the least. I can understand parts of vectors or shapes go off canvas if those parts have to remain intact.

I don't agree at all. Clip, as a verb, is to remove things. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/clip I don't know how or where you found that sample question but it reads completely bizarre just on the face of it. "Clip these together"?? That isn't even normal language. Who talks like that?! Anyway, it isn't the use of the word 'clip' that is the main issue, it's just that Affinity gives us TWO tools, one to clip the canvas smaller, and one to grow it. Since we have a "make smaller" tool and a "make larger" tool, it doesn't make sense that the "make smaller" tool changes its behavior and becomes the same as the "make larger" tool just because some objects are out of canvas bounds. A quick CTRL-Z fixes it when it happens, but the point of using the clip canvas tool is to "make the canvas smaller if available to do so". Not "make the canvas smaller if avail.... WHOOPS NO LETS GROW IT INSTEAD YEAHHHH!". Maybe I'm alone in this

That's all fine and dandy, but creates confusing between the two tools. The very word "clip" assumes something is being cut off or reduced or hidden. By using the word "clip" but then making a feature that is effectively "resize", the language is incorrect. In every graphics tool I've ever used, to "clip" something is to reduce its size or hide parts of it. Obviously this is splitting hairs, but I don't think clip canvas should be increasing the size of the canvas, that's the purpose of the unclip tool. Or, just change the language to make more sense. This isn't clipping the canvas, it's resizing the canvas to the max object bounds. Perhaps "Auto-resize Canvas" is a better wording, or some such.

As for the clip and unclip canvas tools, I understand how they work now, but they still end up doing the same thing. Clip canvas removes unused canvas down to object boundaries. Unclip canvas grows canvas to object boundaries. The problem is this, when you use clip canvas, and there are objects outside the canvas bounds, it grows the canvas just like unclip would. But if you use unclip canvas, it won't shrink the canvas like clip does, no matter what. This half-overlapping behavior is confusing and probably shouldn't be the case. Here is what I would expect from these tools: 1) Clip canvas will only ever shrink a canvas, because that's what it does, never the reverse. 2) Unclip canvas will only ever grow a canvas, because that's what it does, never the reverse. #2 is actually true, but not #1. The behavior overlaps with unclip and often create unintended consequences. The point of using clip canvas is to shrink the canvas if it needs it, but if your canvas randomly grows instead, that may be entirely what you don't want and weren't expecting.

For anybody finding this in the future, things seemed to have changed. Rasterize doesn't clip anything out of canvas. You have to use Rasterize & Trim to remove out of canvas data.

Brilliant, I kind of assumed the ability existed somewhere, not sure how I missed it. The only issue with this, for me, would be that I have to do it layer-by-layer over and over. If I have an image composed of lots of images, I would still want an option to basically crop my canvas and destroy all the off-canvas data at once, rather than go through every layer one by one.

I sometimes want to crop my canvas down to the size I need, but Affinity keeps/remembers the original size of things like photos. I don't have an option to destroy the photo or basically force the crop to remove "outside" content it seems. If I try to use clip canvas OR unclip canvas, it does the same thing. It just grows the canvas up to the size of whatever object/layer/image has content outside the visible canvas area. What I want to do is the opposite, I want it to destroy all the content outside of the visible canvas. For whatever reason, I don't need the extra content, I don't want it taking up space in my file size, etc. When I go to crop my canvas, I want all the data outside that crop to be gone. One use-case for this is copying just a part of an image, such as a texture. Say I download a texture and it's 1024x1024 pixels. I will resize this and then crop it to the part I need. Everything "looks" good on the canvas, so I ctrl-c the layer and ctrl-v into the other doc. However, I don't get the part I need, I get the entire image again, rather than the cropped out part, because Affinity saved the off-canvas data. So the only way I can properly copy the part I need is to do a selection first. But this is extra work. I just want to copy the layer and paste somewhere else, without getting all the extra data that I thought was cropped out. I was thinking clipping the canvas or unclipping it would somehow do this. But it doesn't, both those options do the same thing. Anyway, the question is, what's the easiest way to do a crop and not maintain any content whatsoever outside the crop area if I don't want it? And what exactly are the clip and unclip canvas options, since they both seem to do the same thing? Thanks!

Figures, I don't have a proper backup of the bad one. I spent so much time deleting layers and moving to new files and editing and copying back, etc. I have a suspicion that what was going on is that my original texture was a large file, a regular photograph where I took the sample texture from. As I erased all the parts of the sample out, leaving only the texture, Affinity must have been keeping all the data for the whole photo around?? So when I make copies of this layer and try to merge them, it was perhaps too large of a layer as far as how much data was in it? When I made a selection of the texture, then copied just that little bit and made sure there was no other data in the layer, this one merged just fine. On the large photo layer crashed on me. I'm not sure I could duplicate this again but I'll try.

I updated to 1.7.3.481. I always grab the latest updates when they come out. I've been working on a project which isn't that big yet. It's 3807x2003 pixels, or 7.63MP. I've got 7 primary layers and just a few basic adjustment layers and masks. The file size of the .afphoto file is 61MB. The problem is that it won't merge down a pixel layer. I've got this one small layer with a texture on it, it's only about 150px wide by 20px tall or something, a little texture for a landscape project. When I duplicate the layer and adjust things and then try to merge down into the lower texture layer, AP freezes up on the "merge down" spinner and never recovers. It sucks up memory quick, up to 10GB and more if I let it until my whole system crashes. I tried duplicating the file, deleting all the other layers, still crashes. I tried coping just that texture layer into a new document, merge still crashed. I assume there is something wrong with this little texture layer, because I eventually got it to work by getting a new document again, then cropping down to the smallest size I can get away with. Then export as a plain JPG, then import back to a fresh new doc again, then I was able to duplicate and merge this new one. I don't know what was wrong with the layer, but that was really weird. If it helps, I'll tell you how I originally created the texture. Simple, I just grabbed a photo of the item I wanted (some rocks). Then I sized the selection down, did a perspective adjustment, and sized down again based on where I wanted it in the image. The original photo was sized down and distorted so much that my texture was little more than random pixels of red hues, which is all I wanted. My guess is that there must have been information from the larger photo still lingering somewhere in that pixel layer, even though I had erased all the content down to the selection I wanted. I don't know. I could try and create a minimal document that still crashes on me, and send that to someone privately if it helps. Or maybe this is a known issue already? Thanks!