Crop picture without changing (cropping) the canvas size.

[mclainart]

I can have an 8x10 canvas with several photos in it that I am arranging.  When I want to crop one of the photos, the whole canvas becomes the size of the one photo that is cropped and I lose all the other photos.  

I am unable to find instructions on how to prevent this.  

Edited April 22, 2022 by mclainart

[John Rostron]

Hello @mclainart and welcome to the forums.

What you see is precisely what one would expect from cropping a canvas. Could you be more precise as to what you are expecting  to happen.

It looks as if you are wanting to have your cake and eat it!

John

[mclainart]

I am trying to crop a photo within the canvas, not crop the whole canvas.  I've worked with other graphics programs where that is a normal function--Have a document and being able to crop several photos within the canvas while mainting the document size.  

[walt.farrell]

The Crop Tool in Affinity Photo operates on the complete canvas/document.

The Crop Tool in Affinity Designer works like you want; it is for cropping objects or layers.

You can do the same kind of cropping in Affinity Photo by using the Rectangle Tool. For example, given this document:

I can draw a Rectangle with a Fill (any color):

And then I can drag the Rectangle layer in the Layers panel down onto the thumbnail of the Image layer:

 

And the Image layer is now cropped.

There are other alternatives, too.

[mclainart]

Thank you Walt and Hens.  You have answered my question!!  Very much appreciate you taking the time to respond!!

[AVC]

On 4/23/2022 at 7:05 AM, walt.farrell said:

The Crop Tool in Affinity Photo operates on the complete canvas/document.

The Crop Tool in Affinity Designer works like you want; it is for cropping objects or layers.

You can do the same kind of cropping in Affinity Photo by using the Rectangle Tool. For example, given this document:

I can draw a Rectangle with a Fill (any color):

And then I can drag the Rectangle layer in the Layers panel down onto the thumbnail of the Image layer:

 

And the Image layer is now cropped.

There are other alternatives, too.

Sorry to dredge up an old thread, but seriously this is so frustrating. Why should I have to jump through hoops to achieve something so basic as cropping an element (in my case a photo) on a canvas instead of just cropping the whole canvas?!

[Nomad Raccoon]

No clue, I'd love to have a normal crop function too

[Greg T]

On 4/22/2022 at 5:05 PM, walt.farrell said:

The Crop Tool in Affinity Photo operates on the complete canvas/document.

The Crop Tool in Affinity Designer works like you want; it is for cropping objects or layers.

You can do the same kind of cropping in Affinity Photo by using the Rectangle Tool. For example, given this document:

I can draw a Rectangle with a Fill (any color):

And then I can drag the Rectangle layer in the Layers panel down onto the thumbnail of the Image layer:

 

And the Image layer is now cropped.

There are other alternatives, too.

I can't seem to find a similar question in V2 using bing.com ... But this method doesn't work for V2 and I'm having the same problem!

 

[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, Greg T said:

But this method doesn't work for V2 and I'm having the same problem!

It does work in V2. Please provide more information, e.g. screenshots or a video showing your problem, or perhaps a sample .afphoto file where you've tried it.

[natecombsmedia]

I'm actually VERY confused about this 😅. I have the crop object/selection option like 80% of the time I click Crop in Photo, which is great. I can use the resize canvas/document features to change the canvas more precisely...but then, another 20% of the time, it randomly switches its function to cropping the whole canvas, which I never need.

Why is mine how everyone wants it most of the time, and how could we get it to stay that way or toggle between the two? Right now, it is stuck in canvas mode, so I will have to send to a different Affinity program to crop.

Perhaps personas could be added to all programs for those handy features we need between the three. I much prefer Designer and Publisher for book covers, but I find the color comes out gross and washed out in Publisher, while Photo handles the colors like a champ and has blending tools that are better for, haha, any photo elements than Designer and can still hold my vectors fine.

Strange indeed!

[TheMagicianGamer]

This works like a charm.

1. Select the layer you want to crop
2. On that layer using a selection tool, select what you want to crop out
3. Go to Layer > Invert
4. Then delete the inverted area

Hoped this helped :)

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, TheMagicianGamer said:

This works like a charm.

1. Select the layer you want to crop
2. On that layer using a selection tool, select what you want to crop out
3. Go to Layer > Invert
4. Then delete the inverted area

Hoped this helped

You left out a step that was shown in that tutorial. Between steps 2 and 3 there was a Select > Invert Pixel Selection.

And, really, the Layer > Invert is not the right action to take. Instead, Layer > Rasterize would be better for step 3, as that's really what is needed (and it just happens to be a side-effect of the Layer Invert function).

[TheMagicianGamer]

Oops. Your right.

[PaulEC]

Personally I prefer to avoid destructive cropping, so rather than deleting part of the layer I would either clip the layer to a shape or use a mask,.