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Cutting out part of a picture to use independently


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  • Staff

Hello Chloe,

Welcome to Affinity Forums.

 

Draw a shape with the size/format you want (can be a circle or a star for example), position it over the image, then go to the Layers panel and drag the shape you just created over the thumbnail of the image (a small blue vertical bar will appear) and release it. This will create a mask that you can adjust if you decide to change the size/format of the shape later.

 

If you really want to discard the rest of the image (destructive operation) do this way instead:

Change to Pixel Persona, go to the Layers panel, select the image, go to Layer menu on top and select Rasterise...

Then select one of the four Marquee Tools, draw a selection over the area of the image you want, and do a copy and paste.

A new object with the area you selected will appear in the canvas. You can now delete your previous image.

Currently there's no way to crop images directly in the Pixel Persona. For regular crops use the Vector Persona's crop tool instead.

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Not sure what your are trying to achieve, but in Pixel Persona you can use any of the Marquee tools to select an area of an image and copy and paste. Best advice though is to crop the image before you place it in Affinity. Note: You can switch back to Draw Persona and use the newly created image.

2009: 27 inch iMac / Intel Core i5 / 2.66 GHz / 16 GB Memory / System: Yosemite 10.10.3 – PRINCIPAL DESIGN SOFTWARE: QuarkXpress 9.5.1, 10.5 and 2015 / Pinegrow Web Designer / Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo / Acorn

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  • 3 weeks later...

Great question to post - this was the very first activity I tried to do. I've done this in half a dozen or more other programs and never needed to resort to outside help. I wonder why that is so complicated to perform in Affinity? What is the significance of the blue bar on the layer? I'm just now trying to locate tutorials that follow some particular order to bring me up to speed.

 

It's possible that Affinity is targeting the Adobe audience rather than more casual users like myself: I'm an engineer and software developer that still needs to be able to draw to get my point across. So was hoping that Affinity would be the platform to move to now that some of the big players are moving to a subscription model (and I won't be going with them!).

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Hi agilefalcon, welcome to the forum.

 

Regarding your quote:

 

It's possible that Affinity is targeting the Adobe audience rather than more casual users like myself...

Affinity is unashamably pro and a lot easier and nicer to use than Illustrator. Especially for non art trained people like myself.

 

But with the price tag that anyone can afford. You will have to leave your comfort zone (Cartoonmike, knows what I mean) and learn AD. The good news is; there is so much developer and user led tutorials in this forum, that you should be able to find your preferred method of learning ranging from Ronniemcbride's online video course, a certain pumpkin tutorial, as well as the Vimeo videos and of course the good ol' Q&As in the various posts here in the forum.

MacBook pro, 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB, OS X 10.11.6

 

http://www.pinterest.com/peter2111

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Hi Johny - thanks for the Vimeo tutorial - I am really new to these tools so I am struggling to follow and I couldn't quite understand the steps you have outlined. Could you explain how to make the mask? (Sorry if it is explained elsewhere).

 

Many thanks in advance.

P

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Thanks for the video, gave me an idea of how to reproduce the behaviour of the cropping tool in Photoshop. But these are still too many steps...

My steps are:

1. Add rectangular mask with given width and height

2. Upscale mask while holding shift to keep aspect ratio until it hits vertical/horizontal maximum

3. Rasterise the parent layer of the mask

4. Downscale to the desired resolution

5. Create a slice in export persona with desired resolution and export

 

Pretty much stuff to crop an image with given aspect ratio :/

Founder of www.pixel-pub.de

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi Guys... been using AI all my life ....this program is refreshing....that said I'm having a wee issue on the above topic ......followed steps by the letter to clip portion of photo....after I drop on thumbnail ..photo goes white and I'm left with blue outline with corner and side handles

 

Can anybody help please?

 

Many thanks

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  • Staff

Hi Paddy Dakar,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Don't drop the photo over the thumbnail (this creates a mask instead), drop it over the layer area on the right of the thumbnail.

 

To clear things up:

Draw/create the shape you want to use to clip the photo, then on the Layers panel drag the photo over the layer of the shape. You should see a horizontal blue rectangle appearing right below the shape layer (to let you know that the photo is being dragged over the shape object). That's it.

You can then click on the arrow on the left of that layer to expand/collapse it so you can be able to select just the image, and then move it on the canas to position it precisely inside the shape. 

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Not sure what your are trying to achieve, but in Pixel Persona you can use any of the Marquee tools to select an area of an image and copy and paste. Best advice though is to crop the image before you place it in Affinity. Note: You can switch back to Draw Persona and use the newly created image.

This worked great.  I reduced 220Mb from my drawing by just getting rid of unused pixel areas in some layers.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2009) with macOS Sierra

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If you are looking to learn how to more advance selections like this: 

 

AD_raster_manipulation-test.jpg

 

 

you can find it in lecture 28 of my course.

 

Alternatively, you can also find part of that answer in this free tutorial found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP7eBT6lLWc 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi, I struggled to follow the instructions above and ended up with an empty selection box like Paddy.

 

The simple solution I used was to first draw my shape on my page and then place my photo on the same page overlapping the shape. Next I selected the photo and using edit, cut my photo. Then I clicked on my shape so it was now selected. Finally I went back up to Edit and on the drop down menu selected Paste Inside.

 

This allowed me to drag the picture around inside my shape and resize it, when I was happy with that, clicked on some blank space and then was able to drag my new shaped picture around.

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  • 1 month later...

I would like to seperate my product image from the background so it can be used in both (fabricated) lifestyle type images and on white backgrounds for web and brochure use.

I am really struggling to achieve this and would be happy to find a tutorial / course that could help me be proficient with AP (affinity photo)

 

few questions;

 

1.   what is the key difference between designer and photo as much of the forum seems to mix the two?

 

2.   what is the difference between customer and public beta in terms of functionality?

 

There are not many youtube tutorials out there as yet so any help would be appreciated otherwise have to send the images to an agency for them to do the task for me.... or is there anyone out there who can do this job for me for a fee?

 

Thanks, Nigel

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  • Staff

Hi Nigel,

 

1. Affinity Designer is a professional hybrid vector/raster software for design (web/graphic/UI) and illustration. It's comparable to Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw (or Inkscape in case of open-source software). In simple terms it's an application to draw/design.

 

Affinity Photo is an image editing/development software, mostly used to enhance/retouch/paint raster images. It's comparable to Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photo-Paint as image editor but also to Lightroom, Aperture, Corel After Shot Pro as a RAW development /conversion software. In simple terms it is an application for image retouching, painting and RAW conversion/development.

 

2. The Public Beta is available for everyone to try without any time restrictions until the application is released in the Mac App Store for the first time. After that it will be only available as a Customer Beta (see below).

 

The Customer Beta is only available without time restrictions for those who have purchased the application in the Mac App Store. For users who haven't purchased it, it will run as a trial (limited to 10 days).

 

 

You can find some tutorials/resources for both applications listed here.

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Hi MEB

is there any difference in functionality between Customer and public versions of Photo.

 

Are tutorials relevant for both photo and designer ie functions?

 

Thanks for your help so far.....

 

I want to buy this software but I need to learn how to use it and there seems to be much more help available for lightroom and photoshop....

 

Thanks

 

Nigel

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  • Staff

Hi Nigel,

Currently Affinity Photo is only available as a Public Beta. It wasn't released yet in the Mac App Store (it's not available to buy), because it's still in development. You can use/test the Affinity Photo Public Beta for free for the time being until its release without any time restrictions.

 

Since the programs are used to perform different types of work, i wouldn't say that all the tutorials are relevant for both. Some are only applicable to Affinity Photo while there are others that only make sense in Affinity Designer. However there's some tools and dialogs that are common to both programs - for example the Pen and Node tool and the Refine Edge dialog -. In those cases if you learn how to use those tools in one program you should be ale to use them exactly the same way in the other.

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  • 2 months later...

For simple cropping there is the "Vector Crop Tool".  (Not sure if this tool was available when the original question was posted)

 

The vector crop tool shows handles that you can drag to select a part of an image, similar to cropping in iPhoto.

You can use the cropped image like this and retain the ability to change the cropping later, or you can select "Layer -> Rasterise" to make the crop permanent.

 

 

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  • 1 month later...

wow!!!! can see that when someone is putting under judgement the innovation and possibilities of Affinity tools, there are a lot of answers trying to validate these outstanding performances, that many cannot find either by ignorance of the tools. or by biased expectancies. Well..this is all in th benefit of everyone of the people, me included, that not judging the tool with alacricy or comparison with others (specially the seemingly eternal emperor of them....Adobe suit), are wishing to make a good use of the purchase and be confident in what many of you are generous to share,

 

I have found that jakerlund's video is perfectly answering the question of this post. Thank you so much for it. And then, well...need much time to learn from the other entries.....but time is not eatable, not will be gone to anywhere,,,,I will do it!!

Thanks to everyone of you.

Rosq

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi, I struggled to follow the instructions above and ended up with an empty selection box like Paddy.

 

The simple solution I used was to first draw my shape on my page and then place my photo on the same page overlapping the shape. Next I selected the photo and using edit, cut my photo. Then I clicked on my shape so it was now selected. Finally I went back up to Edit and on the drop down menu selected Paste Inside.

 

This allowed me to drag the picture around inside my shape and resize it, when I was happy with that, clicked on some blank space and then was able to drag my new shaped picture around.

I am in the same position as Reedy.  The process described by people above only works if the image IS the document.  If the image is 'placed' into a doc as a layer, then the empty selection box scenario happens, and the only way I can get it to work is by the method described by Reedy above!

Must be doing something wrong I guess!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks for the videos and written instructions. It is quite a complicated tool to use in my opinion with a significant investment in time required to get the basics. I was hoping for something simpler along the lines of Xara (now Photo Magix/Designer) that I use on a PC.

 

I'm a photographer (not professional) and I sure hope the new photo app isn't as complicated as this!

 

Cheers,

Chris

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  • Staff

Hi agilefalcon,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Affinity Designer is a design application able to deal with vector and pixel data for graphic design. illustration, UI etc, however it's not intended for photo editing. Affinity Photo the most suited tool for that task.

It's also not much different from Xara in the sense that most tools offer realtime editing (directly over the objects on canvas). However due to being a new app there's still some things to polish and a few features missing.

 

Affinity Photo offers considerable more tools than Xara for Photo editing. It's also more powerful, although a little more complex too. You may want to give it a try since there's already a trial available. You can get it from here.

Any questions you may have the just in forums.

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