Publisher Photo Persona crop problem

[hhauten]

Within Publiser I activate Photo Persona to crop the picture. This does not work. All it does is move the pocture around in the frame, as if I had selected the move tool (which I did not).

I have W10 and the latest Publisher.

Harold

[walt.farrell]

If the Photo or Designer Persona's Crop Tool were to operate as they do in the standalone applications, when choosing them while you're working on a Publisher page you would be cropping the complete page, not any picture or other object you have on the page. Switching to the Designer or Photo Personas does not normally change the context you're operating in. If you started out on a Publisher page, you're still editing that page.

I think that the Affinity designers have recognized the unique nature of cropping, and done something clever when you choose either the Designer Persona's Crop Tool or the Photo Persona's Crop Tool.

You end up with Publisher's vector-based crop tool, which, like Designer's Crop Tool, applies a vector-based mask to the object you crop, rather than the raster-based cropping you get in the Photo application. And it is restricted to dealing with objects on the page, rather than cropping the page itself.

At that point you crop the image by adjusting its control points, which will apply a vector mask to hide or expose parts of the image as you choose. Thus, within Publisher, while you're in the context of working on a page, all 3 crop tools work the same way.

To crop an image that you have placed on the page, you have several choices:

1. If you have it in a Picture Frame, adjust the size of the Picture Frame, or move the image around within the frame. This is probably the usual way to crop an image that you have on a Publisher page.
2. If you did not use a Picture Frame, then you can use either the Publisher or the Photo or the Designer Crop Tool, as I mentioned above. This will even work with a Picture Frame.
3. Both the preceding were in the context of editing the page. As an alternative, if you select the image using the Move Tool, there will be an Edit Image button on the Context Toolbar. Using that button will enable you will edit the actual image, not the Publisher page, in a new document tab. If you then switch to the Photo Persona the Crop Tool will operate as you were expecting.
   
   Note 1: If you edit the image (approach 3) you're editing the actual image, and any changes you make will affect the actual image, not just the copy in your Publisher document.
   Note 2: This will work differently if you have a Placed document (PDF, .afphoto, etc.) rather than a Placed image (JPG, TIFF, etc.).

[hhauten]

Thanks, Walt, for your elaborate answer. To fully understand I had to go to Publisher to try it out. It does wat I want. Thanks.\

Harold