Affinity Photo: How do I crop without moving the selection outside the canvas?

[Eirik]

When I crop a photo and move the crop/selection around, it moves outside the canvas if I'm not careful. Is there a way to make it impossible to crop outside the canvas/photo? I dont understand when I would ever want to do that.

[Alfred]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, Eirik.

Cropping outside the canvas can be useful if you want to expand the canvas to include a border.

For more precise control, don’t use the Crop Tool: use the Rectangle Tool instead. Draw a rectangle under the photo layer, adjust its size and position directly on the canvas or via the Transform Studio, and then go to the Layers Studio and drag the rectangle layer upwards, dropping it on the thumbnail of the photo layer.

[Eirik]

On 6/3/2019 at 1:55 PM, Alfred said:

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, Eirik.

Cropping outside the canvas can be useful if you want to expand the canvas to include a border.

For more precise control, don’t use the Crop Tool: use the Rectangle Tool instead. Draw a rectangle under the photo layer, adjust its size and position directly on the canvas or via the Transform Studio, and then go to the Layers Studio and drag the rectangle layer upwards, dropping it on the thumbnail of the photo layer.

Are you serious? The best way to crop is to not use the crop tool? I tried it and there is one big problem with this that makes it not a viable solution for me and that is the lack of aspect ratios. I need to be able to crop with specific aspect ratios.

is there really no way to make the crop tool stay inside the canvas?

[DM1]

1 hour ago, Eirik said:

Are you serious? The best way to crop is to not use the crop tool? I tried it and there is one big problem with this that makes it not a viable solution for me and that is the lack of aspect ratios. I need to be able to crop with specific aspect ratios.

 is there really no way to make the crop tool stay inside the canvas?

Often your image will be larger than the canvas. This is why cropping extends past canvas. Just because you cannot see it doe not mean it isn’t there. 

Cropping in Affinity is also non destructive, this means the crop is merely resized to fill the canvas area. If you select Canvas Unclip canvas, the canvas will show all of the image again. 

To make a permanent crop, after cropping, go to layer menu and select Rasterise and trim.

Cropping has aspect Ratios (infinite, just type what you want). 

[Ulysses]

1 hour ago, Eirik said:

... one big problem with this that makes it not a viable solution for me and that is the lack of aspect ratios. I need to be able to crop with specific aspect ratios.

is there really no way to make the crop tool stay inside the canvas?

You can easily obtain whichever aspect ratios you want by creating a custom aspect ratio, as described by @DM1.

As for ensuring the Crop tool doesn’t go beyond the boundary of the canvas, simply enable and configure Snapping — which is available under the Documents tab. Your crop tool will snap precisely to the edges.

 

[Eirik]

Thank you!! That is exactly what I want. Snapping should be on by default imo. I was ready to give up on this app because of how frustrating some of it is.

 

[Ulysses]

2 hours ago, Eirik said:

Thank you!! That is exactly what I want. Snapping should be on by default imo. I was ready to give up on this app because of how frustrating some of it is.

 

Those of us who ALWAYS want this behavior may think so (I'm in your camp on this). However, there are a number of projects for which snapping gets in the way and needs to be turned off. So I'm good with it either way.