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Cropping photographs

Cropping photographs - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator CS5 Essential Training

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Cropping photographs

Sometimes, you'll place an image into a layout inside of Illustrator, but you only want to see a portion of that image. Now in programs like Photoshop, there is a Crop tool that lets you actually remove pixels that you don't want inside of the image. However, in Illustrator, we can't edit pixels. We just treat the whole image as if it were one object. So, if we only want to see a portion of an image, while we can't actually remove any pixels, we can hide pixels from view. We do so by creating something called a Mask. Imagine, for example, if I had this photograph in front of me, as I see right here, and I were to take a piece of paper, and I were to cut a hole out of the middle of the piece of paper, and then put that piece of paper on top of this photograph, I'd only be able to see the photograph through the hole that I've cut out. That's an essence what a mask is inside of Illustrator. Now it so happens to be that when you're working with images, Illustrator has a great little…

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