Crop seems broken in 1.7.1.404 - help needed - new user

[Roland Wooster]

I'm new to Affinity, coming from Photoshop. Using 1.7.1.404 on Windows 10. I can't believe what a basic question this seems, but I can't get cropping to work in an efficient manner. I load a RAW image, in 32b mode, develop it, so I'm in the Photo profile. Then I press "C" to enable the cropping tool and it auto selects a cropping box around the whole image - why?. It seems ridiculously inefficient to then have to find and move the top left bounding box and the bottom right bounding box to my desired crop. I just want to click and draw a box within the image, how can that be done?

If I left mouse click to draw the top left corner that just moves the existing bounding box, so then it's even harder to get the bottom right. Even if I mess around with moving the top left corner box and the bottom right corner box but then decide I want a different size, this is a very slow process. 

Even more ridiculous if I press "C" and then select a common ratio of 1:1 the bounding box goes off screen so now it takes ages to go find the bounding box corners. 

I must be missing some modifier key or something because this can't be how anyone uses this.

Thanks for the help!

Roland.

his  

[R C-R]

It is not as simple or intuitive as drawing out a crop box, but if you leave the crop mode set to the "Unconstrained" default, you can click & drag on any of the crop box handles to change the size of the crop box, & move it around by clicking & dragging anywhere inside it. The pointer changes shape to indicate what will happen if you drag.

[Alfred]

10 minutes ago, R C-R said:

you can click & drag on any of the crop box handles to change the size of the crop box

That’s true, but the OP wrote:

10 hours ago, Roland Wooster said:

It seems ridiculously inefficient to then have to find and move the top left bounding box and the bottom right bounding box to my desired crop. I just want to click and draw a box within the image, how can that be done?

 

[R C-R]

I know what the OP wants, but since there is no way to do that I suggested one of the ways to change the size & position that is provided & does not by default make the crop box larger than the document.

[Roland Wooster]

But if I want it to force 1:1 for a square picture the only option seems to be to select Custom Ratio, 1:1 first, at which point the default crop box is off the screen and I then have to scroll around to go find both the top left and bottom right crop corners. 

Quite simply if editing a large number of pictures this single "feature" is enough of a problem to make me look at alternative editing tools. However I find it unimaginable that it's not just my error and there must be some setting or option somewhere to change the default behavior. 

It greatly worries me that you seem to be agreeing that this is a genuine limitation that can't be made more efficient. 

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, Roland Wooster said:

a genuine limitation that can't be made more efficient

I think we’d all like any limitations to be made less efficient!

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, Roland Wooster said:

But if I want it to force 1:1 for a square picture the only option seems to be to select Custom Ratio, 1:1 first, at which point the default crop box is off the screen and I then have to scroll around to go find both the top left and bottom right crop corners. 

For some reason, the developers thought it best to set the vertical dimension of the initial crop box so it matches the size of the largest dimension of the image. That is fine for a portrait-mode image, but puts the top and bottom edges of the crop off the screen for a landscape-mode image, as you have noticed. But there are some things you can do to improve your efficiency.

First, you don't need to select Custom Ratio and then select 1:1. Start by clicking the cog and selecting 1:1. That can save you one click to change the  Mode box.

Next, don't scroll around to find the crop corners. Just grab a side handle and drag it toward the middle. The top/bottom of the crop box will come down to meet the edges of the image, and you'll have a square crop as soon as you've dragged the side of the box in far enough to match the image height.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Next, don't scroll around to find the crop corners. Just grab a side handle and drag it toward the middle. The top/bottom of the crop box will come down to meet the edges of the image, and you'll have a square crop as soon as you've dragged the side of the box in far enough to match the image height.

And as I mentioned, the cursor will change from the cursor that indicates the crop box will be moved to one of the double-headed ones that indicates it will be resized along the axis of the arrow.

Also, if you use one of the presets often, to avoid having to scroll down to find it in the list revealed by clicking the cog, you can open the Preset Manager via the 'burger' menu at the top of the list & drag it to the 'none' category at the top, or create your own category, drag that to just below the 'none' one, & drag the preset into that.