Crop according to selection

[San Lee]

Hi Affinity team! In first time, I want to congratulate you for your softwares!

But I have a simple request: I would like the same "crop" as in Photoshop! (Image > Crop) (It's a crop according to selection)

Actually, I don't use Affinity Photo because of this one missing feature!

It's a huge miss I think, as this feature saves a lot of productivity!

I hope you will hear my request!

[Alfred]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @San Lee.

Although there is no ‘Crop To Selection’ command in Affinity Photo, you can achieve the same result by copying the selection and then using the ‘New From Clipboard’ command on the File menu.

[loukash]

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

Although there is no ‘Crop To Selection’ command in Affinity Photo, you can achieve the same result […]

… by:

1. enable Snap to pixel selection bounds (View > Snapping Manager)
2. press "C" for Crop tool
3. let the crop rectangle snap to your selection bounds
4. press Enter

2 hours ago, San Lee said:

I would like the same "crop" as in Photoshop!

I hear you, and for the first five years of having and occasionally using Affinity Photo, I desperately wanted that, too. And went back to PS CS5.1 every time.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that all I really need is to regenerate my Adobe-brainwashed synapses and give myself in to the Affinity workflow by simply rethinking some ways how to do things. The Affinity crop tool is quite powerful. It just works differently. Meanwhile, I've finished my "crop tool transition" successfully.

That said, there certainly is a plenty of room for improvement. Be patient.

[I just want copy selection]

Sorry, but how is this still not a function? This is such a basic request, and having seen requests in threads up to six years ago, I wish I could get a refund. The product is that stupid without it. Which of the three in the suite will allow this? None. I can't even get it to copy the selection, it pastes my entire image. Absolutely useless, and the designers should be ashamed. I'm going back to Pixelmator

Edited March 25, 2021 by I just want copy selection
clarity

[loukash]

5 hours ago, I just want copy selection said:

I can't even get it to copy the selection, it pastes my entire image

For demonstration purposes, I've now used menu comands, a few extra clicks, and proceeded generally very slllooowwwwllllyyy to show what steps I'm performing, but it all can be done within a few seconds with a few keyboard shortcuts and clicks:

The main thing to remember here:
A marching ant selection always affects the layer(s) selected in the Layers panel. If no layers are selected, there's nothing for the marching ants to, well, select. This is by design. Photoshop behaves the same unless when working on a locked background layer.

5 hours ago, I just want copy selection said:

Absolutely useless

Hm.
When everything else fails, have you tried to:

• read the manual?
• watch some tutorials?
• ask questions in the forum?

[loukash]

6 hours ago, I just want copy selection said:

I just want copy selection

Or even faster:

[MEB]

Hi @San Lee, @I just want copy selection,
Welcome to affinity Forums
Thanks for your feedback. Is there any other reason/workflow/use case besides being able to crop from arbitrary/non-rectangular selections for this request which can't be performed using Affinity's Crop Tool?

@Alfred
That's not the same: crop to a selection acts on the whole image(layers) whereas copying a selection and using the New From Clipboard command only pastes the content of the layer that was selected.

[Alfred]

23 minutes ago, MEB said:

@Alfred
That's not the same: crop to a selection acts on the whole image(layers) whereas copying a selection and using the New From Clipboard command only pastes the content of the layer that was selected.

Well, you can select multiple layers if you want. But you’re right, of course: even if you ‘Copy Merged’ you still don’t get the same result as you would expect from ‘Crop To Selection’.

[San Lee]

On 3/25/2021 at 12:47 PM, MEB said:

Hi @San Lee, @I just want copy selection,
Welcome to affinity Forums
Thanks for your feedback. Is there any other reason/workflow/use case besides being able to crop from arbitrary/non-rectangular selections for this request which can't be performed using Affinity's Crop Tool?

 

Hi @MEB! Thanks for your question. 

I'm posting a video as an example of a part of my workflow, it will be more meaningful (it's just an example, the file names can be different from each other, the pictos can have more varied sizes, the recordings can alternate between jpg, png and gif...)

Photoshop's cropping tool is really powerful, it crops the whole document, so all layers too. A simple Cmd + Z allows you to return to the whole file and to select again an element to be cropped (Cmd + click on a layer). And unfortunately, Affinity Photo is far from matching Photoshop for this function (but only for this part! Affinity Photo is excellent otherwise! But it is this part that prevents me from using it at work).

Edited March 26, 2021 by San Lee

[loukash]

19 minutes ago, San Lee said:

Affinity Photo is far from matching Photoshop for this function

Well, what you're doing here in Photoshop is called Export Selection Only in Affinity:

No crop tool necessary at all.

[loukash]

38 minutes ago, San Lee said:

the pictos can have more varied sizes, the recordings can alternate between jpg, png and gif.

You can also use the Export Persona, create slices – which are available in PS for Export For Web as well, for that matter – and then export everything in one batch. Should be faster than pressing 100 × cmd-Z in PS…

[San Lee]

35 minutes ago, loukash said:

You can also use the Export Persona, create slices – which are available in PS for Export For Web as well, for that matter – and then export everything in one batch. Should be faster than pressing 100 × cmd-Z in PS…

@loukash Thx, but the slice tool does not meet my needs, as I often need the image to be edge to edge.

 

45 minutes ago, loukash said:

Well, what you're doing here in Photoshop is called Export Selection Only in Affinity:

No crop tool necessary at all.

Thank you! That answers part of my request! Only part of it, because in my production, I also have to adjust the size often. I crop a picto, resize it to the right size, save, undo x2, and start again with another one (which can be a different size).

But thanks anyway, it's a step forward already! 😀

[loukash]

2 minutes ago, San Lee said:

the slice tool does not meet my needs, as I often need the image to be edge to edge.

What is "edge to edge" supposed to mean? A slice can "be" from "anywhere to anywhere".

The only drawback I've noticed with slices so far is the lack of snapping, but I might be also overlooking something. Haven't used slices very often for "serious" work yet, not even in PS or AI in the past 20 years.

Just now, San Lee said:

I also have to adjust the size often

Find new workflows. Explore. Free yourself from the narrow Schmadobe Mindset™. It's fun! (Well, mostly…)

7 minutes ago, San Lee said:

I crop a picto, resize it to the right size, save, undo x2, and start again with another one (which can be a different size).

Well, for pictograms like yours, first of all I would work in Designer with vector objects and with pixel preview, making sure to select Snap To Pixels and watch out for any blurry subpixel edges. But to each their own preferred workflow…

[San Lee]

@loukash > "edge to edge", it's maybe another words or expression (sorry, I'm french, my english isn't always good sometimes 😅 )

By "edge to edge", I mean that the cropping is done exactly to the measurements of my selected picto, with no space around it.

[loukash]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

I might be also overlooking something. Haven't used slices very often for "serious" work yet

1 hour ago, San Lee said:

By "edge to edge", I mean that the cropping is done exactly to the measurements of my selected picto, with no space around it.

Ah, haven't done bitmap/pixel art in years, perhaps decades…
But this was easier than I thought:

And I see there unexplored options like Batch Builder and Export Preset which may actually do what you want even faster.

[I just want copy selection]

What is it that you are doing that I am not doing @loukash?

[loukash]

5 hours ago, I just want copy selection said:

What is it that you are doing that I am not doing

Your layer is of type "Image", sort of like Photoshop's smart object. You may need to rasterize it to become a "Pixel" type.

[praivo]

Here's a thread about this exact thing from 2018: is Crop to selection possible - Page 9 - Affinity on Desktop Questions (Mac and Windows) - Affinity | Forum (serif.com)

As someone in that thread pointed out, all that needs to be done is to make the crop tool snap to the selection if you press Enter/Return without changing the crop box (in PS it's Enter/Return to snap and preview, then again to confirm and crop). The cropping tool itself doesn't need to be changed in any way, just the input. And even the snapping is already there (Snapping - Snap to pixel selection bounds will do exacly this if you move the edges of the crop box near the selection), so all we're asking for is making this fully automatic. And at that point we could even go one step further and have an option to keep the crop a certain distance away from the boundary (i.e. boundary + [insert number] px on each side). This would be very useful when editing photos of rectangular objects (e-g- TVs) that just don't look right if there isn't a bit of background visible on each side.

And FWIW, "Export selection" isn't the solution if it's not the final step. When I was editing the TVs mentioned above, I'd often have to remove lens distortion. The quickest way to do this was to select the layer with the TV, crop to selection, and THEN deform the thing to get an uniform gap on all sides. An extra step or two can be a big deal when you'd have to do it 30+ times a day (especially since there are already several extra steps in e.g. creating a selection from multiple curves)...

[Armelline]

Adding another voice to this request. Sure there are more cumbersome ways of achieving the result, but a simple, clean "select an area, crop to that area" option would be much much more preferable.

[Peter van Westen]

Here another vote.
As requested by MANY users in this thread (from 2017!), this basic feature is pretty much a must-have!

And as stated there, here you can see how cumbersome it is to crop to a non-square selection in Affinity Photo:

[loukash]

8 minutes ago, Peter van Westen said:

see how cumbersome it is to crop to a non-square selection in Affinity Photo

You don't have to zoom out and adjust the existing default crop rectangle. Just click anywhere to draw a new one, wherever you want, at any zoom level you want. Moreover, if your snapping settings are set up accordingly, the pointer will already snap to the selection boundaries before you start to draw.

12 minutes ago, Peter van Westen said:

this basic feature is pretty much a must-have!

It's nice to have as it probably won't "hurt" anything.
On the other hand, I've been a PS user since the mid-1990s and I don't recall to have ever used it once, so…

[Debra35]

As I've posted elsewhere, I don't understand the pushback against this feature request. This is useful and speeds up the workflow for many people. 

1. "But it's a destructive workflow".

Maybe, but it's what I need for my workflow to be productive. You can still have your 'non-destructive' workflow if this feature is added.

2. "But you can just copy the layer to a new document"

I'm cropping to selection 1000 times in a day and your workflow will add hours to my project.

3. "Add talking point here"

Why are you so opposed to adding this feature when it clearly will benefit a lot of people, while taking away nothing from your workflow?

Please stop trying to convince the people who are requesting this feature that they don't really need it, or can just use some alternative workflow. It's condescending of you to assume that just because you don't find a use for it, no one else will. This is a basic feature that is present in most other serious Photo editing apps, and having it in Affinity Photo will just make a great tool better and more versatile. 

[Peter van Westen]

4 hours ago, loukash said:

You don't have to zoom out and adjust the existing default crop rectangle. Just click anywhere to draw a new one, wherever you want, at any zoom level you want. Moreover, if your snapping settings are set up accordingly, the pointer will already snap to the selection boundaries before you start to draw.

It's nice to have as it probably won't "hurt" anything.
On the other hand, I've been a PS user since the mid-1990s and I don't recall to have ever used it once, so…

What does that have to do with other people using it heavily and wanting that feature? Useless comment.

[Peter van Westen]

4 hours ago, loukash said:

You don't have to zoom out and adjust the existing default crop rectangle. Just click anywhere to draw a new one, wherever you want, at any zoom level you want. Moreover, if your snapping settings are set up accordingly, the pointer will already snap to the selection boundaries before you start to draw.

It's nice to have as it probably won't "hurt" anything.
On the other hand, I've been a PS user since the mid-1990s and I don't recall to have ever used it once, so…

And having to manually draw a box is (1) cumbersome for a simple thing, and (2) not automatable (can't record that in a macro and have it be dynamic).

[I just want copy selection]

8 hours ago, Debra35 said:

Why are you so opposed to adding this feature when it clearly will benefit a lot of people, while taking away nothing from your workflow?

Please stop trying to convince the people who are requesting this feature that they don't really need it, or can just use some alternative workflow. It's condescending of you to assume that just because you don't find a use for it, no one else will. This is a basic feature that is present in most other serious Photo editing apps, and having it in Affinity Photo will just make a great tool better and more versatile. 

Absolutely nailed it. Couldn't have said it better myself.