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Cropping a photo also crops stroke


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Perhaps by design, but to me this is an oddity/quirk:

Add a couple of photos.
Say you want to mimic a classic photo, so you put a white stroke on one, and a drop shadow.
Some of the photos you crop, some not.
You then copy the layer effects from the first photo to the rest.

Result: All parts of the stroke that goes outside of the photo bounding box will be cut on cropped photos.

You CAN work around this by only using "stroke inside" — but it is a bit counterproductive since the drop shadow, while no doubt outside the cropped bounding box (correctly) stays visible.
So I would suggest the paradigm should be "stroke is added to photo after crop", not "before crop and thus affected of the crop itself". 

Hope you see what I mean.

Thanks,

/Fredrik.

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7 hours ago, expressoaddict said:

All parts of the stroke that goes outside of the photo bounding box will be cut on cropped photos.

Interesting... the crop tool is indeed ill-behaved on photos with strokes applied.

Suggestion in the interim: try using a picture frame instead and applying the stroke to the frame instead of to the picture.

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  • Staff

Hi all,

If you look at how the crop tool works, you will understand why this works as it works. 

That crop tool is a "Vector" crop tool - That picture is clipped by a rectangle, and using the crop tool you basically "hide" stuff that outside the rectangle's boundaries, including the stroke. Stroke from the context toolbar is a pre-crop operation, so it will be cropped by the crop tool. If you want to use it as a post-operation tool, you would need to use the FX Outline, which is applied after the crop operation. 

Moved to discussions as it's not a bug. 

Thanks,

Gabe. 

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3 hours ago, GabrielM said:

That picture is clipped by a rectangle, and using the crop tool you basically "hide" stuff that outside the rectangle's boundaries, including the stroke

That is unnecessary behaviour – crop tool should behave similarly regardless if image is placed as is or within a frame. This problem comes from the unnecessary divide to plain and framed images. It would be much simpler if all placed images had a frame, simple plain placed images would just have a frame of 0 mm stroke. Complication comes from partly from single file format (AP files certainly do not have to have frames).

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4 hours ago, GabrielM said:

Stroke from the context toolbar is a pre-crop operation, so it will be cropped by the crop tool. If you want to use it as a post-operation tool, you would need to use the FX Outline, which is applied after the crop operation. 

Please consider comparing it to Illustrators behaviour, where you can add multiple effects, outlines, appearance-options (even offset-functions) to ONE object and also are able to define the order in which they are applied. Indesign, for example, is different here, as it only allows strokes on the frame, but allows effects (shadow, glow, transparency,...) on both the frame AND the picture in it. This, of course, was never consistent and I would welcome it if Affinity came up with a better cross-app-solution.

 

But, to be clear, I don't think either ID and AI are the one right way to go – they are tailored to solve their specific tasks: 

  • What I like about InDesign's way is that it's what you usually want for fast lay-outing: Divide the page into a system of blocks of text/image/color-frames, and later fill in whatever text or images you get from the copywriter or photographer for that specific page.
  • Illustrator's stackable appearance system goes way deeper than strokes, as you can stack multiple shadows over each other (including step and repeat operations!) just for ONE shape. 
  • Main machine: iMac 2019 (21,5-inch 4k, 6core), 64GB RAM, 1TB nvme + 2TB ssd, running on Mac OS 13;
  • Display setup: 28" 5k Display (primary) + 21,5" iMac4k-Display for studio panels (secondary);
  • Keyboard layout: german apple extended keyboard (aluminium);

 

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  • 3 months later...

Am I missing something here? Is there a reason not to just create a rectangle and give it the stroke (or using Appearances even several strokes) that you want to use to create the frame, then put the picture into the rectangle as a child layer. Now you can control every aspect of total size and shape, picture zoom and even distorted shape, and picture framing within the rectangle just by clicking either the mother or daughter layer (rectangle layer or picture sub-layer) in the layers stack and manipulating the elements however you please.

Cropping without Crop.afdesign

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  • 2 years later...

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