Crop Tool improvements

[TomAng]

Thanks, Devs, for change to Crop tool: drag anywhere to change is improvement.

Also not remembering last setting on Unconstrained certainly suits my work.

But: could we have remembering previous setting on Resample crop: pretty often would be handy e.g. when resizing a folder of pix for banners, or for social media posts.

[bures]

10 hours ago, TomAng said:

Thanks, Devs, for change to Crop tool: drag anywhere to change is improvement.

I hope the developers will add a similar control for resizing shapes.

[Ash]

1 hour ago, bures said:

I hope the developers will add a similar control for resizing shapes.

Yeah guess it's something we could look at as a preference thing at some point.

[captain13chris]

Thanks for the drag anywhere function. I would like the area of the “corner drag” to be made a little bigger though. With the new function it’s rather hard to get the cursor to switch to the corner resize tool as you still have to precisely click on the corner. That’s different from dragging the sides where you can now drag anywhere. I often find myself dragging just one side when I wanted to drag the corner. Is that understandable? 

[Ash]

24 minutes ago, captain13chris said:

I often find myself dragging just one side when I wanted to drag the corner. Is that understandable? 

Yes, that's a bug - the hit area for corner drag seems to have been decreased unintentionally with this change. We'll sort it.

[PaulEC]

One thing that I do think would be helpful with cropping, and also other tools, especially the Perspective Tool, would be a keyboard shortcut to enable mirrored movement. So that, for example, two opposite sides/nodes could be moved in and out together, in sync, rather than trying to balance both by eye.

[Hangman]

@PaulEC, I believe that is on it's way for cropping at least, assuming this is what you have in mind... but totally agree it would be great to have for all tools including the perspective tool...

Quote

In unconstrained mode, holding Shift will constrain the current aspect ratio and Cmd (Ctrl on Windows) will resize around the centre coming in a future build

[PaulEC]

Thanks, I missed that! 

[hawk]

Is this a place to post suggestions? If so, I'd like snapping to transparent pixel edges.

Much love.

[Ash]

1 hour ago, hawk said:

Is this a place to post suggestions? If so, I'd like snapping to transparent pixel edges.

We're hoping to get in an auto crop to opaque before 2.1 release (as suggested earlier in thread) -particularly for when you rotate / straighten to quick crop to max opaque area / remove all transparent areas. Will that effectively achieve what you want or is it something else?

[hawk]

YES! That sounds amazing. Thank you so much!

[hy13]

The listed Improvements are welcome. My first test shows good results. Like "NotmyFault" above I would like the anchor point setting to be added. I would not like the Spiral overlay as a default. It is not really handy in use. A golden section grid would be better if the thirds default is no longer welcome. For me the thirds grid still is Ok.

[hy13]

@AshIs this an error?

Crop tool, unconstraint mode, default

A picture is open and a second picture was placed somewhere on top of it. Then crop tool was opened and some turn was applied. When I decide now to discard the change(turn) then I get 2 different results: 1. pressing ESC button discards the change as expected. 2. Choosing Break (next to Apply) does not discard the change, instead keeps it applied and exits crop tool.

When active layer is changed from the second picture to the first picture, before discarding, then 1. and 2. both discard the change as expected.

Without the 2nd picture on top this above behavior was not seen.

[Ash]

1 hour ago, hy13 said:

I would not like the Spiral overlay as a default

Spiral shouldn't be default (should be thirds grid), but it does remember your last used mode. Once you set back to thirds is it not thirds again next time you use tool? Hitting O also cycles these overlays in case you were not aware.

[TomAng]

Thirds grid is very yesterday. The way to go is Golden Ratio or Phi. There are many ways of cutting an image into Phi ratios, but the basic, centred is useful for many jobs, and replaces the thirds which is too static and not balanced anyway (IMHO).

[TomAng]

That's the Golden Spiral tracking Fibonacci ratios – which has its uses but (I find) seldom to guide cropping, more for post-capture analysis.

Phi grid is a grid that looks like Thirds only more subtle. In practice, I find many people think they've set things up to Thirds but their instinct has actually got them to place on Phi ratios.

E.g. Thirds pic below was presented as composed according to Rule of Thirds (sorry picture owner; took this off a Facebook post; can't remember whose): but actually main elements are closer to Phi grid - 2nd pic with more lines.
The beauty of Phi grid is that it can run from the any of the sides or be centred horizontally or vertically – each giving nuances that Thirds can't.

[Petar Petrenko]

13 hours ago, TomAng said:

Thirds grid is very yesterday. The way to go is Golden Ratio or Phi.

You can talk for yourself only. Everyone has it's own rules that follows and it is OK.

[Petar Petrenko]

On 2/17/2023 at 11:51 PM, loukash said:

Draw a blank vector shape of your choice and clip (not mask) any layer(s) you want with it.

So, why do we need crop tool, if we can achieve the same results with vector shapes?

Crop tool in Photo should work the same way as in Publisher and Designer. For now, you can crop the image only to the document size and after that it is unusable at all. You can't crop any other object if you need to.

[Hangman]

Quote

Cmd / ctrl / shift constrain modifiers are now available when in unconstrained mode as promised.

Again, small change, huge improvement, thank you...

[Petar Petrenko]

Hi,

can some be so kind to explain to me what is the difference between the Crop to pixel selection and the standard crop. Meaning, what extra can be achieved with the first one that can't be done with the second? I watched the video and what I saw is, in the end, the result is the same with a few steps more or less.

[debraspicher]

3 hours ago, NNN said:

Hi,

can some be so kind to explain to me what is the difference between the Crop to pixel selection and the standard crop. Meaning, what extra can be achieved with the first one that can't be done with the second? I watched the video and what I saw is, in the end, the result is the same with a few steps more or less.

Selections can be saved, so there is that. They can also be saved/loaded from a file. Also, there's the possibility to snap selections to elements in the document using Quick Mask. It's also possible to create selections based upon layer contents specifically. This makes it possible to select based on alpha (transparency). If I select contents and want to make really delicate changes to the selection (expand, pad with 10px, etc) afterwards, then it would more straightforward to convert that to a crop.

Much of this is workflow dependent and just depends on what the ultimate goals are. Some people may never use it. Others may use it a ton and save time.

[Frozen Death Knight]

I noticed that resetting the crop with Escape disables the modifier keys to transform the crop from the centre and/or constrain it. Only after dragging once and confirming the placement am I able to use the modifier keys again.

[Frozen Death Knight]

I am really liking the new auto-crop to selection feature. Being able to ctrl+L click a thumbnail to select and then activate the Crop Tool is very handy. That said, a small quality of life improvement that would help newcomers find this feature would be if there was a button while using the tool that said "Crop to Selection". It would automatically do the selection part for you based on whatever layer/layers you happened to have selected in the Layers panel at the time. Since the Layers panel is still fully available when using the Crop Tool I think it would be pretty clear how to do these sorts of crops to any new user.

Another idea that could improve this new feature along with adding a new button for it would be the option to add some padding around your selection. For instance, allow us to type in a number in the top toolbar, i.e. 3 pixels (based on document units and should also allow negative values), which will create a 3 pixel spacing from the selected objects and the final cropping area. This could also be added as a feature to the Artboard Tool since it too has a selection based cropping feature.

[Petar Petrenko]

Please Affinity, add an option in Preferences or with some modifier key to crop objects in Photo, not only the canvas.

[Ash]

On 2/15/2023 at 3:53 PM, captain13chris said:

I would love if this also applied to straightening photos within the crop tool. I would like an option for the crop tool to automatically adjust to the picture while straightening it - just like in Apple Photos. Right now it is extremely difficult to exactly match the borders of a straightened picture with the crop tool.

We have now added this functionality in the latest build if you want to give it a go...