Secret Crop Tool

This is an undocumented tool that lets you crop only bitmap images in FreeHand 8 documents and above.

Version: 8 and above

Submitted by: Marko Virkkula
Content written by Ian Kelleigh

This tip describes how to turn your pointer into a Crop tool so you can easily crop bitmap images (TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PICT, BMP) without pasting inside of a square.

For this example, I want to add a bitmap to this logo. So I place and scale it in the general area. But I want to crop out some of the area around the important parts of the image. Next I put guides down where I want to crop out the image and bring the guide layer to the top of the layer list.

To access the Crop tool, just press the C key. You're cursor will turn into the standard Crop tool icon. With it, click on the bitmap image to select it.

Now just put the tool over a corner of the image and it will change into a pointer hand. Just click and drag the corners of the image to snap-to the guides.

Here is the final piece with the image all cropped out to the guides I had laid down.

WARNING

If you've cropped an image using this method in an earlier version of FreeHand 8 and open the document in a newer version of FreeHand, you may need to re-crop the image.

This isn't the perfect solution to cropping out images. If you need a line around your image, you still need to draw that square. This will not work on other types of imported art such as EPS files so that's probably why this isn't documented.