In previous versions of Illustrator, if you wanted to crop a photo, it wasn’t very easy. You had to draw a rectangle on top of the image, select the image and the rectangle, and go to Object > Clipping Mask > Make. The image below would be cropped (masked) to the size and position of the rectangle. In Illustrator CS3, I stumbled upon a new cropping feature that for some reason, I could not find mentioned in Illustrator Help (Help > Illustrator Help). When you select any pixel image, a Mask button magically appears in the Control panel. If you click on this button, a mask is created, which can be easily adjusted by clicking-and-dragging bounding box points in or out to crop the picture. If you decide to re-crop, select the Mask with the Group Selection tool or the Direct Selection tool, then Switch to the Selection tool. Using the Bounding Box Points you can easily re-crop the picture. Finally, there’s a Mask in Illustrator that almost feels like a Frame.
Tip provided by Jeff Witchel, Certified Adobe® Training Provider.
Author: jeff witchel
Jeff Witchel graduated from Pratt Institute in 1973 with a B.F.A. (Cum Laude) in Advertising Design and Visual Communications. He has been an award-winning advertising art director, writer, designer, illustrator, and TV producer ever since.
Before starting his own advertising agency in New Jersey, Jeff built his career at top New York ad agencies such as Young & Rubicam, Grey Advertising, and Wells, Rich, Greene. Over the years, he has created award-winning work for many clients including AT&T, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Jell-O Pudding, The Plaza Hotel, and Pfizer. His many prestigious awards include N.Y. Art Directors Club Gold Award, One Show Gold Award, N.J. Art Directors Club Award, multiple Andy Awards, Graphis Annual, numerous readership awards, plus an Emmy Award nomination.
Jeff is a self-taught computer artist with over 19 years of experience. His initial introduction to the computer was with PageMaker, but he switched to Quark 1.0 when it was first introduced in 1987. Having arrived on the desktop publishing scene so early, Jeff became the “go to” guy for answers when others started getting into computer graphics.
As an Adobe Certified Expert, he’s provided online support for Adobe and is now an Adobe Certified Training Provider for both Adobe Illustrator CS2 and Adobe InDesign CS2. Jeff is one of just a handful of Adobe Certified Instructors in the New York metropolitan area. He also is a Quark Certified Expert in QuarkXPress 6 as well as a master of Adobe Photoshop and related applications. He counts among his training clients ad agencies, design studios, magazines, illustrators, and photographers in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
