Affinity Photo - Crop Layer

[Julian23]

I recommended a friend AP to do photo editing and printing. 

 

He wanted to crop a picture and print it on a DinA5 page. 

 

I told him - the best is to create a new DinA5 document and drag the image on it.

Yes, that worked, but how should it be cropped?

 

The cropping tool which offers cropping unter Affinity Designer always crops the complete document, not the current layer. 

To crop a layer according to the manual I am supposed to create a new layer and move the image layer into it. 

 

Well, it is good that this work - but it is more complicated for somebody who does not use this program very often.

 

Why does the layer cropping tool available in Designer does not work like this in Photo?

[MEB]

Hi Julian23,

The Crop Tool available in Designer is a (non-destructive) object based crop tool. It's intended to be used directly with any object mostly for layout purposes such as getting a better image composition in place when laying out a flyer or similar projects without the need to edit it in an image editor. Affinity Photo cropping is usually used to compose the whole document/image as a definite step. They serve different purposes and as such differ in their functionality. 

 

You can use a vector mask in Affinity Photo to achieve a similar functionality (which is basically what Designer's Crop Tool does). To do this use the Rectangle Shape tool to draw a rectangle to be used as a mask. Then drag it over the image layer's thumbnail in the Layer's panel (you should see a small vertical blue line appearing on the right side of the thumbnail - release the mouse at that point). The rectangle mask in now nested to the image layer. Click on the small arrow on the left of the image layer to expand it, then click on the mask's thumbnail to select it and adjust it's position, size as you usually do for a regular vector object.

[Julian23]

Thank you - yes, I was aware of this possibility and also the manual recommends it.

But I am actually looking for a destructive cropping of the layer - simply select a rectangual part of it and remove the rest.

In one competing product it is even possible to do create an uneven rectangle (a trapeze) and crop it to an even rectangle which is very useful for quick perspective correction. 

[Fixx]

In pixel editors cropping usually refers to document cropping. If you want to remove parts of the image and leave background visible you can just use selection marquee and select wanted area, invert and delete. Of course there is a difference if the image is object [image] or pixel layer, as [image] must be rasterized first.

If you are doing object oriented layout work AD would be better tool.

[Howard Worf]

Yesterday I came to do my first crop in Affinity Photo only to find that there is no destructive crop option. ​​I think this is a serious omission. I had to save my image 16 bit image as jpg and then open the newly save degraded image before I could use a Topaz plugin because the plugin imports the whole canvas, not the cropped image. Saving as a .tif didn't work, as the canvas remained the same uncropped size. I don't know if non destructive cropping as the ONLY option is a good idea in Designer, but frankly it's a poor implementation decision as the only possibility in a Photo editor.

[Fixx]

If you select "rasterize" for a layer it certainly removes extra area behind the "crop border".

[Bonfires Down]

Can i "unlink" a vector layer so that it stays the same size while I resize my image?