Using clipping mask-Flattening?

[Akhenaton]

I am trying to clip a circle out of a rectangle .jpg. That works but i want to eliminate the 'excess' .jpg parts. They are still shown on individual layer. Kind of like a crop.
Using CS2

Thanks

[Scott Weichert]

Can't do that in Illustrator. In addition, every image must be a rectangle, regardless of what application you use.

Illustrator doesn't "crop". You can create a clipping mask to hide portions of an image, but the entire image rectangle will still be highlighted to let you know where it is.

I do wish there were cropping options in Illustrator rather than just masks, but there simply is not.

[alcbevtesting@alltel.net]

I agree it would be nice to be able to crop images in Illustrator. it is nice to have Photoshop to be able to trim images made in Illustrator.

Could you live trace (expand) and then carefully use the eraser tool in CS3 to do this kind of thing though? NO - thats silly - if you live traced you would be able to do things like divide and "trim" the "excess" away right?

Adobe give us some selection and crop/delete tools in CS4!

[Akhenaton]

What would be a simple way to do the trimming in PS. I have it as well.

[alcbevtesting@alltel.net]

Simplest way I know would be as follows:
Open up the jpeg and make a copy of it (so as not to lose the original intact image). Turn off visibility to the copied layer.
Select the background (or original layer) and use the marquee selection tool to draw out your circle (or rectangle - I think you wanted to cut a hole in your image and save the "hole" piece).
Ctrl J (if on Windows) this selection to a new layer and turn off visibility to the background layer.
You can now apply layer styles (stroke, bevel etc - if desired- to the area you selected).
Save the file /save a copy of the image and delete the other layers if needed then save out your new image as a new jpeg.

Hope this helps.

[kazbear]

Depends on what your final intention is. Since you are dealing with an image, then its probably best to do it in Photoshop. But just in case, here is an option for Illustrator:

Draw a circle around the area you want to crop. Select that and the picture and create a clipping mask. Draw a rectangle the same size as the circle and place it exactly in the same postition as the circle. Set crop marks using the rectangle. Export as an image. If you exprt as PNG or PSD, you can set transparency. With PSD, you can even place this back in an Illustrator document and keep the transparency.

[alcbevtesting@alltel.net]

Nice point Kazbear. Works very well. I still think though (if you have Photoshop) that it works better there in PS and you can add embellishments. If you only have Illustrator though this tip of yours will work very well.

It is interesting that InDesign got a huge makeover with a lot of Photoshop functionality but Illustrator needs some new tools added to it to bring it up to speed.

[aesthie]

Hope you don't mind me interrupting this thread to ask a really dumb question: why?

The 'clipping mask' I presume you've used visually crops the image. Yes.. it's irritating me that you can still see the bounding box and don't seem to be able to switch 'view bounding box' off individually so Illustrator is really 'busy' on screen. With regards to sending anything to print though.. the 'excess' as you call it won't be there... not sure why you're spending the time going into PhotoShop... have a feeling there's a gem here, that i don't know so hoping you'll share it. Thanks.

[alcbevtesting@alltel.net]

I think just file size and convenience - only reason to clip it in Photoshop. That is what I do because I have PS, know it better and like to do it that way. Others may feel differently. So nothing special about this in my opinion.

[mcadwallader]

Hi I found this thread because I had this same problem. I just found a very quick fix:

Copy and paste into Photoshop
Select all
Copy and paste back into Illustrator
Done

Why? Well, for me, it's so I can quickly paste graphics into Flash to create movieclips with a registration point in a sensible place. Impossible to code otherwise. In Fireworks you can flatten a mask in one step, maybe they'll integrate that into Illustrator next time.

Good luck :)

edit: just realised, this works fine for my purposes, you'd have to manage the image size a bit more carefully for print as simply cutting and pasting converts to 72dpi