Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To and today I'm going to show you a few ways
to crop images in Adobe Illustrator. First, I'll show you how to crop a photo,
and then I'll show you two ways to crop illustrations. All right, let's get started.
All right, I'm here in Illustrator, and I'll create new. I'll come over here to Print,
I'll choose Letter, and then create. The first way to crop is with a raster image like a photo or a
PNG or JPEG file. So, to do this, I'm going to get a photo on my canvas, so I'll go to File > Place.
I'll choose this Pexels image and place it, and now I want to crop it right about here or so,
starting here. So, I'm just going to come up here to my control panel and choose Crop Image.
Now, if you're not seeing this, it's right under here under Window. It's Control. You can also come
up to Object and Crop Image right here. Now, we'll get this little warning that says, "Hey, this is
going to embed a copy of the original, so it's not actually cutting your image where it exists on
your computer." We'll say OK, and then we'll get these little handles. We can just bring them in
and get it however we want and then hit Enter or Return. Now, if we come over here to our Links,
by the way, all these windows are available under Window. So, if you're not seeing Links,
it's right here. And you can see by this little icon that this is an embedded image. So,
even if you change the one on your desktop, it will not update here. This lives just inside
Illustrator. So, that is how to crop a photo. Now, honestly, I would use Photoshop to crop images
and then bring them into Illustrator, but this is an okay workaround if you don't have Photoshop.
It's just that having embedded images in your Illustrator file can make the file size really
big. So, I'm going to click on this with my selection tool and just drag it off the screen.
The second way to crop is with a vector image. Now, a vector image has paths and anchor points,
and I'm going to go ahead and open this nighttime beach one. I'll select it all with my selection
tool and I'll copy it. Come back to my original document and paste it. Now it's really huge,
so I'm going to hit S, which will get me to my scale tool, and then Enter or Return, which will
bring up this dialog box. I'm just going to put this at 30. That looks pretty good. So, I wanted
to show you the difference between a raster image, which is this one, and a vector image. If you hit
CMD Y or CTRL Y, your raster is going to be a box, and then this is what you'll see for your vector
design. So, if you're trying to figure out which one it is, you can just hit CMD Y or CTRL Y to
find that out unless it's just a simple rectangle, of course. This is going to look similar to this
if it's all by itself, and then hit CMD Y or CTRL Y to get back. Okay. So, the second way I'm going
to show you is with a mask. So, I'm going to hit M on my keyboard to get to my rectangle tool,
which is right over here, and I'm just going to draw a box where I want the crop to be,
I think right about here. Now, this is going to be the mask itself. It doesn't have to have a fill
or a stroke, but it does need to be on top of everything else. I'm going to change the color
just so we can see it a little bit better. Now, I'll get back on my selection tool, and I'm going
to draw a box around everything over here, around the mask and the vector that I want to mask. And
then I'll come up here to Object > clipping mask and make, or you can do CMD 7 or CTRL 7 on a PC.
So, our box kind of disappears, the color we had on it. It's contained the underlying vector into
the box that we had. Now, the nice thing about doing it this way is this is non-destructive,
meaning when you mouse over it, if you have smart guides on, you can see that
that piece is actually there. It's just hidden. And if you wanted to move these parts in here
around inside that mask, you can select it with your selection tool and then get on your
group selection tool, this one right over here, hold shift and click right on the edge of it,
and now you have everything but your mask, and you can use your arrow keys to move things around
inside your mask. Another thing you can do is just unmask it, resize your mask,
and then remask it. So, let's do that. I'll come up here to object clipping mask release.
And so now, we've got back what we had before. You can see that mask is right here. So, let's just
bring it in like this. We can select all again and then hit CMD 7 or CTRL 7 to redo the mask.
So, that's the second way to crop an image. Now, if you're confused about clipping masks,
I actually have another video about those, and they were one of the harder things for me to grasp
as a new Illustrator user. So, that'll be right up in the upper right-hand corner of your screen.
Now, the third way to mask is a destructive way. I'm just going to copy this picture and paste it,
so we have another version of it. Now, let's say we didn't want anything outside the mask,
and we want to completely get rid of it. Now, as I mentioned before, this isn't the best way to do it
because you might realize that you need those things, and then they'll be gone forever.
But if you're sure that's what you want, open your Pathfinder window and then choose divide, which
is this one right here. And this is the result we get now. So, they look exactly the same, but if we
hit CMD Y or CTRL Y, you can see that all this information out here is only hidden. It still
exists, but down here, it's actually gone from the image. I'll hit CMD Y or CTRL Y to get back. So,
that's three ways to crop. Cropping with a raster and then two different ways of cropping with
a vector. All right, I hope you liked this video. If you did, please click on the like button,
and I'll see you next week with another graphic design video. Thank you!!