Affinity Photo: Drag & crop image to pixel dimensions

[paweltkaczyk]

A simple problem: I have a photo, and I want it cropped to become Facebook's cover photo (or a featured image on my blog, I have many presets). I have the exact pixel dimensions: 820x340 and want to crop it from a bigger image. But I want to actually draw the area I want cropped and scaled.

 

In Photoshop it works like this:

• you select pixel dimensions
• you drag a rectangle on the image, it has a fixed aspect ratio, but can be any size
• double clicking then crops the image and scales it to the exact pixel dimensions.

I can't figure it out in Affinity Photo. I can have a preset with exact pixel dimensions, but when I scale the area, the pixel dimensions change as well. I want the program to apply the pixel dimensions after I drew the area I'm interested in. Can it be done?

[Fixx]

Seems at the moment this cannot be done in one operation. You have to crop first and scale then.

[toltec]

Not in one go as Fixx says

 

I found getting the ratio right is the hardest to visualize so I draw a rectangle (shapes tool) set it to the size I want using Transform. That will give the exact ratio and crop area. Shift drag on a corner if it needs scaling up to constrain the ratio.

 

Press Control Enter to turn it to curves or click on Convert to Curves

 

Click on the Pen tool and click Selection.

 

Press Control C to copy it.

 

Go File > New from Clipboard

 

That will place it in a new document at the right ratio. Resize the document.

 

I'm sure there's an easier way but it works for me.

[R C-R]

Something to consider is that in Affinity Photo the Crop Tool is non-destructive -- the rest of the image is still there. It can be revealed by using the Document menu > Unclip Canvas item.

 

More to the point, after applying a crop if you click on the image with the Move Tool you can still move or scale it. So instead of tediously drawing out the crop box to the area you want to crop the image to using the Crop Tool, just apply your 820x340 preset without moving or scaling anything. Then use the Move Tool to position & scale the crop to whatever you want. You may have to zoom out some to see the bounding box handles but you have complete freedom to scale proportionally or not, to rotate, & to move the image around to show any part of it interactively & non-destructively.

 

If you are exporting the document to a raster format like JPEG or PNG, do that in the normal way & only the cropped part of the image will be exported. Save the file in the native .afphoto format & you can open it again at any time in the future & change the scale, position, etc. & repeat the process.

 

If you don't care about that but do care how much file space the "extra" part of the image will use while saved in the native format, you can right-click on the layer in the Layers panel, choose "Rasterize" from the popup menu, which will destructively remove the cropped part of the image. Use Save or Save as to retain the native file format.