[is Crop to selection possible]

To be fait it is not a matter of Photoshop, never has been. I don't use PS and I don't care.

Crop to selection is a rather basic feature that does not necessarily relate to super expensive products.

On 8/14/2021 at 5:11 PM, PaulEC said:

If you want to crop to the outer edges of several selections, as per Peter's video, I don't really see why you would bother to make several selections

I previously posted a video that shows one very common and simple use for "crop to selection". Now, of course one could try to manually select the thing with pixel precision, but that is a waste of time when the fuzzy selection is super quick.

 

[is Crop to selection possible]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

This method clips the canvas to fit the selection - but doesn't actually crop pixels. The invisible parts are still stored in the .afphoto and reappear when you increase the canvas size. At any later time. – I guess what is missing is the ability to entirely get rid of pixels (data) with a 1-click action (without copy/paste or rasterization etc.).

The non-destructive nature of the operation is not an issue here (and never was the point of the original post). One can always destroy later, if needed.

You could argue that the same behavior is shown with any kind of cropping you do using the crop tool.

[is Crop to selection possible]

Geez, I just discovered this way and it makes life so much better! 😁

 

[is Crop to selection possible]

4 minutes ago, oO5Dynasty said:

I also noticed Copy from the selection does the same thing as the macro.

 

That's only because you are starting with a rectangular selection, not parts of the corners.

[is Crop to selection possible]

I use the macro sometimes, but unfortunately I have seen that in some occasions it seems to not crop very precisely (as if it is off by 1px or event less than that).

In any case, thank you for posting it!

[is Crop to selection possible]

With the crop tool video you posted, you manually and approximately moved the crop rectangle until you kind of cropped the photo in the center.

Not in a precise way, not automatically. How is that comparable?

Please also note that "crop to selection" does not have to be destructive at all. If the crop tool was able to snap to the selection boundaries, one could use it to perform a non-destructive crop operation.

[is Crop to selection possible]

9 hours ago, oO5Dynasty said:

I am confused by your question.

Tropilio is probably surprised by you mentioning the crop tool, given there is totally no way of snapping the crop to the current selection. Which is what we are trying to do.

[is Crop to selection possible]

@oO5Dynasty we all appreciate the fact that you are trying to help, so thank you for spending the time.

However, I think there must be some misunderstanding... "Crop to selection" is not about background removal and is not about masking. The only thing we care is to find the bounding box of a selection.

Here's an example of a picture cropped with GIMP. So, first here's the original picture:

Now here's how we crop with GIMP. Notice the step from having a selection to cropping with a single click...

[is Crop to selection possible]

Nice videotutorial, but that has nothing to do with "crop to selection".

[is Crop to selection possible]

@carl123 thank you! Your macro is amazing. 😁 It's absurd that we need a macro for such a basic feature, but... go figure.

What I don't like about this discussion is the way some users are putting it... Like:

• you just need to do this (+ 10 steps of fiddling)
• you are using the wrong tool
• ... and other nonsense

We all understand Affinity products are quite good. There is no need to reinforce that.

However, making jokes on other users or pretending not to understand that "crop to selection" must crop the picture to the bounding box of a selection is just silly. This feature is present in basically any image editor and has been there in the open source program GIMP for 20 years as well (with one click).

There is no technical issue for Affinity to create a shortcut for the non-destructive crop tool. It would just need to retrieve the coordinates of the active selection and apply those.