Brent Leggett

The crop tool is difficult to use. I would like it to retain the sizes last entered and be able to constrain movement to one dimension (like photoshop shift move). Say I have an image in 3:2 aspect and I want to crop it to 16:9 for HD video. So I can enter 1920 hit tab and then 1080 and there my crop is, taking the full width of the image and cropping equal amounts of the top and bottom off. Great. Now I want to move it vertically to retain desired composition. If I drag it vertically, there's no way to stop the crop region from drifting off the image to the left or right which will leave a strip of background down one side or the other. So I have to reduce the crop size to be sure I don't get any unwanted background pixels. It seems the crop tool has no awareness of the image boundaries. Next I move to the next image and have to begin from the top entering the dimensions in the aspect fields. It would be better to emulate photoshop and have the aspect retained in the crop tool until it is cleared or changed. The current usage is clumsy enough to force me back to Photoshop for cropping website header images or video posters etc.

I too find the invisible bleed area very difficult. @Fixx it's not good enough simply to know it's there and that it works. If we have an image on the edge of the document, most printers require that it extends all the way to the bleed line (that's what bleed is for). So what are we to do, just drag and guess, or manually move the position by 2mm (might require resizing too if we are touching 3 edges with the one image? This is a deal breaker. Drawing a rectangle around the artboard with no fill does not work even with clip to canvass turned off. Visibility is absolutely limited to the artboard edge in artboard mode. The rectangle is invisible unless it is entirely contained inside the artboard, as with all other elements. So we can make our artboards larger by the bleed amount and draw a trim line, but then the export miss-reports the document finish size and as @looksliketired has pointed out, with multipage documents, turning off these manual guide layers for each export is too time consuming. I'm really trying to love AD. So many good ideas and implementations and I'm so angry with Adobe. But I'll have to reluctantly crawl back to Illustrator. @MEB you keep saying "in a future release" but can we please have this issue prioritised? I've just downloaded 1.6.4 in hope - but alas. I think it's time that the designers see this as a design mistake - not a future feature request. You're driving us back to your competitor and, for me at least, wasting my money on my AD purchase.