Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to this. Video tutorial today we’re looking very briefly at cropping in Illustrator and the two different types of cropping that you can do now before I start the video. Let me tell you where you can find additional illustrator training. I have a series of courses at udemy and in the description below are coupon links for all of my courses. My coupon prices are always at least as good as anything that udemy can offer and often they’re even better and over at Skillshare. Well, I have over 200 classes there and again. Another coupon in the description below that includes an offer at least as good as the current Skillshare offer and generally better. Now, if you sign up for Skillshare, you’ll get access to thousands of classes there, including over 200 of mine, so let’s swing across now to Illustrator and discover that two different types of cropping in Illustrator will. The first type of cropping in Illustrator applies to bitmap images like this image, which I’ve imported into an illustrator document in illustrator CC 2017 and later there is now a bitmap cropping tool, so you can grab a bitmap image and up here on the toolbar. You’re going to see an option for cropping the image click that to select it, and then you can go ahead and crop the image now in this case. I have simply linked this file. So the process of cropping it is going to embed it in the document. That’s just fine by me, so I’ll now select the area that I want to crop to, and when I’m done, I’ll click apply And that has now cropped the image in Illustrator now in earlier versions of Illustrator than CC 2017 You couldn’t do that the option that you had in those versions would have been to have created a clipping mask, so let’s go and select and create a rectangle over the top of this image that we’re going to use as a clipping mask in those earlier versions of Illustrator would had to position a rectangle or a shape over the top of your image, Select both the image and the shape right-click and choose make clipping mask and that would clip the image, but it’s a diff current process. In this case, you would still have the full-size image in the layer’s palette and you would have a clipping mask, which is a little bit different to actually having a cropped image now, the other type of cropping that you can do in. Illustrator is to crop a vector shape, but there are a couple of provisos. Here this is a vector shape that has a stroke you can see. It’s got a fill and a stroke. I’m going to show you how to crop this, and we’re going to crop it to a sort of star shape. So I’m going to just drag my star into position, so it’s going to go over the edge of this shape, and I’m just going to press D, so I get the default options here and let’s just go and make a copy of this stock because we’re going to use it in these other two crops in a minute, but I want to focus on this one right now because we have a shape that we’re going to use as a cropping guide, and we have a rectangle that has a fill and a stroke to crop it. We’ll go across to the Pathfinder palette, which, of course you can also get to by choosing window and then Pathfinder, and I’ll click here on crop. Now what you might have noticed is when I crop this shape. Whatever is left of the shape gets the fill and stroke around it now. If that’s not what you want if you just wanted this area of the image, but without the fill and stroke around it, then that’s not what you’re going to get when you use a crop on a shape that has a fill and a stroke now. I have the exact same shape over here, but what I’ve done to It is that I’ve expanded it. So if we go to the layer’s palette with this shape here selected, we’re going to see that we’ve got two pieces we’ve got the outside edge is a filled shape. You can see it’s got a green fill and the inside is a rectangle here. That has this sort of green, a yellow fill. This is going to crop very, very differently, So let’s just go and get our star. We’ll put it in about the same position over this shape here. Select both of them go to crop and this time, we get a very different result because the crop tool when it’s applied to expanded objects gives you the look and feel of what you thought you were going to get. I’ve here on unexpanded objects. You’re not getting the same thing now. The beauty of the crop tool. When you’re working on shapes like this in Illustrator, is that our crop multiple shapes. So earlier, we saw that it would crop, not only the area around the rectangle, but also the bit in the middle well here. We’ve got lots of shapes. I’ve got a outside and inside and another outside of the circle. This is actually a filled shape. It’s a compound pass, so it’s a filled shape here with green, and then we’ve got the pink middle, so we’ve got four objects here in two distinct groups, plus our paths that I’m going to use as a cropping guide and select over all of these go to the Pathfinder palette, click crop and we get a crop that is leaving behind only the bits that we had inside that star, so we’re able to crop multiple shapes. You just put the shape that you want to use as a cropping guide on top of everything and then just crop, but be aware that if objects have strokes, they’re going to crop, perhaps a little bit differently to what you expect that they’re going to do. I hope that this video has been helpful to you and you can now understand your cropping options in Illustrator. If you did enjoy the video, please give it a thumbs up. Click the subscription button hit the notification bell and you’ll be alerted when new videos are released as always, please share these videos with your friends and coworkers and comment. I love to hear from my viewers and subscribers when you view my videos until next time. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me here on my Youtube channel.