Requested Tutorial: Crop Excess Illustrator Artwork
This tutorial was requested (by David) and I’m happy to report, it’s really not very hard to do. If you’ve ever used a clipping mask to hide all of the extra artwork that hangs off the edges of your Illustrator artboard, and wished you could just get rid of the excess, here’s how…
Step 1
You can skip this step if you already know your document size, but in order to crop all of your excess artwork to the artboard, you need to know it’s exact size. You can start with a fresh document and enter in your exact dimensions like below, or go to File > Document Setup to check the document size of an existing Illustrator file.
Step 2
So you have something like the example below with some extra artwork hanging off the edges and you’d like to ‘get rid of the extra.’
With the Rectangle Tool, click once on the artboard to bring up the options, and type in the exact same dimensions as your Illustrator document size to create a rectangle that will match your artboard. Mine happens to be 350 X 350px.
Step 3
You need to make sure your rectangle is on top of everything else. You can do this (with the rectangle selected) by hitting Command/Control + Shift + ], or Right Click on your rectangle and choose Arrange > Bring to Front. Note: If you have more than one layer, this shape must be in the top most layer, and on top of all other shapes.
Step 4
Now you need to align the rectangle exactly to the artboard. To do this, open the Align Palette (Window > Align) and make sure “Align to Artboard” is checked. CS3 pictured below. CS2 and previous users: you’ll find the “Align to Artboard” option by clicking on the palette options (the little arrow in the upper right corner of the palette).
Now, with your rectangle selected, click on these 2 buttons on the Align palette (in any order) to align your shape exactly to the artboard.
Step 5
First make sure that nothing is locked by either looking in your Layers palette, going to Object > Unlock All, or the shortcut: Option + Command + 2 (Mac) Not sure about PC, commenters? Then do a “Select All” (Command/Contol + A, Select > All) or select everything with your mouse. So you should now see something like this, with your rectangle perfectly aligned to the artboard, everything selected, and the rectangle on the very top.
Step 6
Open your Pathfinder palette (Window > Pathfinder) and, with everything still selected, hit this button. (the crop button).
Done!
You should now have no artwork outside of the document size after the crop. Gotta love the pathfinder :)
Final product with nothing selected:
For a non-destructive way to acheive a similar effect, I have a post on “Layer Masking” in Illustrator. It’s not the same as a clipping mask, and It gives the same effect as this tutorial without deleting any artwork. Basically a clipping mask with more freedom.
Tags: Crop, Illustrator, Mask, Tutorial
Yay, pathfinder to the rescue… I do not know when they introduced this little tool to Illustrator, but it makes my life a lot easier.
Something else that I only found out a couple of days ago: When you use the first button (Shapemode:merge) you can actually still move the elements with the direct selection tool. It’s sort of an extended group….
Simple, but a good tip none-the-less. I found the layer mask to a lot more helpful but use both differently.
For production artwork that requires a bleed, the layer mask works great. Gives you a good view of the printable area (sans art board excess) but still allows you to leave required bleed amounts.
For other artwork such as t-shirt designs etc, that don’t require a bleed, the above technique works great.
Nice Tutorial, getting better every day.
thanx bitt.. but this trick doesn’t work with layers that have images, filters, effects, gradients etc on them. right? or have i missed something here?
thanx bitt.. but this trick doesn’t work with layers that have images, filters, effects, gradients etc on them. right? or have i missed something here?
ps: even the layer masking doesn’t help in the above case.
I had been wrestling with this the other week but it involved clipping an image and didn’t work. Usually this wouldn’t bother me too much but I wanted to distort and this meant that the distortion was uneven as the perspective was applied to the whole lot (visible and clipped). Annoying.
If that makes any sense at all and you know an answer to it I’m all ears.
Also, the problems of the last couple of days have gone – I’m using Opera again without any problems! :)
Nice tut, thanks
@k –
For artwork that has shapes and effects that can’t be cropped with the pathfinder (while retaining the same look), I use the Crop Area feature. Draw a rectangle around the area you want to use, and go to Edit > Crop Area > Make which will turn your rectangle into crop marks. Then when exporting the file you can choose to limit the output to the crop area, and some other programs like Acrobat, InDesign and PhotoShop respect the Illustrator Crop Area as the artwork edge.
This of course doesn’t remove the artwork outside the borders, but does suppress the output.
It’s also important to note that this won’t work on placed images.
~Bitt
[...] the full story here Author Tyree Kerr Comments [...]
Great! I didn’t know that. Big big help
Thanks a lot, I was just searching for tutorials on how to do this and I keep coming back to your awesome website!
BITTBOX PLEASE READ THIS URGENT!
I think i discovered what your hacker may have done to the site. I was going though the Freebie section and noticed most of your downloads come from the bittbox.com domain.
Yet the following post directs me to mediafire???
http://www.bittbox.com/freebies/free-high-gloss-graphite-buttons/
I’m scared to open the file? please tell me all is ok with your downloads.
Thank you (and sorry if i alarmed anyone unjustly.. i’ve lost 80gigs of stuff and have to redownload so much.. dont want to risk a virus from a site hacker)
As far as I remember, Bittbox’ first freebies where all hosted externally (is seems this one of them by looking at the date). Only newer works are hosted directly by his domain.
But in general you should check all downloaded files (not even this ones) with a antivirus programm before using/extracting.
That was very helpful, thanks!!
Auron,
That’s perfectly normal. Many of my freebies (especially the PS Brushes) are very large in file size so I host them externally. However Mediafire is starting to remove my files without telling me, so I’m moving everything over to a paid Box.net account.
~Bitt
If you are just trying to achieve a crop when exported you can use the amazingly helpful Crop tool or make any shape your crop using Object> Crop Area> Make, of course if you have a non rectangle/square shape your crops will align to the the edges but still make a rectangular shape. Then when you save for web or export or save a PDF it will crop to the confines of your crop marks.
Great tutuorial! Really helped on this school assignment.
Thanks, and keep up the great stuff.
anyone have trouble with this method on a really complicated file that contains many layers of symbols that use other symbols, brushes that are defined with symbols, and pattern swatches? it seems like with all those combined, even after expanding everything (which causes its own problems due to clipping/opacity masks), it still doesn’t work perfectly. i have a huge file i’ve been hoping to figure this out for so that i could use it as a pattern, but i haven’t had any luck as of yet.
Dude… you rock!i
Hey Bitt how do you request a tutorials?
Gerardo,
Just email me at contact(at)bittbox.com
~Bitt
[...] [...]
That was very helpful, thanks!!
This messes up your transparencies…….
Thanks so much Bitt! I’ve been wondering how to do this for ages!
It does mess up your transparencies but you can ungroup and redo them, or apply the crop before you do the transparencies.
you can also draw a rectangle with the same document size, align to canvas, and in the menu OBJECT, click for CROP / AREA MAKE
that would create a crop area when exporting to other formats
I’ve been wondering how to do for a long time .thanks
Thanks bit, and his commenters, for all the tips. I really needed these tutorials!
It’s good. But hw can we get rid of croping the rasterised images. Is there any key to crop rasterised images?
thankfully wating for ur reply.
If you just want to clip your artwork to the board, there’s an option in ‘Image Size’ tab in ‘Save For Web’ menu while exporting your artwork as jpg, png etc. Just check ‘Clip To Artboard’ and then apply. It’ll just show your work in the artboard when it finally exports.
If you save it as a .pdf file, it will always crop to the artboard.
Haha, thank you so much! I’ve been looking for a way to do this for quite some time now, this’ll make my life so much easier. I’ve been using the web export -> clip to artboard function, but it’s quite cumbersome compared to this. Keep up the brilliant work.
Hi. Why does my crop area doesn’t work whenever I save it for web. It follows the size of the artboard and not the crop area. But i have my crop marks on the artboard. What seems to be wrong? I know it’s working a few days ago but yesterday when I tried it, it wasn’t working anymore. I’m using Illustrator CS3 in Windows.
I’ve tried this a few times and can’t get it to work. The end result is a big square in front with none of my work showing.
Any advice on what is going wrong?
Josh,
I can’t be sure, but did you make sure that you are selecting the layer, not the shape, before hitting the mask button?
~Bitt
I do a CTL+A(PC) before I hit the Crop button and the rectangle is the top most object.
I didn’t see anything in the tutorial about using a mask button. Did you mean the crop button?
Sorry Josh,
Yes, I meant the crop button.
thanks bitt and all commenters.
awesome tutorial and tons of info in the comments. ou probably owuld not believe me if i told you how many hours, days, weeks i have spent trying to do this.
i could not figure out why it would not work if there were photos……
thanks to all
cheers,
tdub
[...] Crop excess artwork [...]
Hi Josh,
Just a thought: if the artwork you are trying to crop are composed of all strokes, like for a crosshatch pattern for instance, then what you will want to do is select the stroke-only object or pattern, go to object>path>outline stroke, and then begin the tutorial. Hope this helps. I was having the same issue you encountered when trying to crop my crosshatch pattern.
Why is it that every time someone points to Illustrator’s Pathfinders as some “exotic secret” method for cropping vector artwork, the demonstrator conveniently leaves out art elements which reveal how utterly inadequate the “solution” really is. I’m speaking, of course, of simple stroked paths.
Try the method described here. But before you do, include in the original artwork something other than merely unstroked filled paths. Truth is, the Crop Pathfinder removes strokes. Completely useless on one of the most commonly-needed cropping situations: maps.
To crop a map or any other artwork containing strokes with the method shown here requires you to first Outline Stroke on all paths. If you don’t, the strokes will be gone in the results.
Truth is, Illustrator fails to provide one of the most fundamental vector editing tools: a proper cutting tool.
I don’t know what it is with Illustrator’s pandemic inability to properly handle unfilled open strokes, but it must be something foundational to the program because it affects all tools and commands that should come into play when needing to cut paths.
Only the very lame Scissor tool cuts open unfilled strokes properly, without wrecking their stroke Appearances. But that tool can only cut one path at one point at a time–completely inadequate for cutting multiple paths at once.
Illustrator is the only mainstream vector drawing program that STILL–after 20 years of “development”– does not provide a proper cutting tool.
JET
YEP, agreed with JET. Another big trouble is that this method removes all groups from artwork. It is real pain to restore them in case of big number of shapes :(
Awesome! I’m new to Illustrator and loathed it for not having a crop tool. This is a huge help. Thanks!
Great tutorial. Thank you!
1234567
Thanks, very helpful. Those techniques are hard to discover if you aren’t told by anyone (but easy to replicate step by step).
Good tip.
anyway way of doing this, incase you still want the elements, etc
is to make sure the cropping shape is ontop of everything, on the same layer and go to select all, then make clipping mask.
Everytime I try and crop I loose my whole image. The top square is aligned and no layers are locked and I select all but when I hit crop I don’t loose the top square and I loose the design. Any suggestions please.
I’m in my first class of Illustrator and this tutuorial was very helpful. THANKS!
thank you very much!!!! Saves me loads of tme!
Just something i found- probably obvious-follows on from the tutorial- You can place the rectangle yourself onto the area you want to crop, then it is aligned as you want. You have already moved the rectangle to the front (as per tutorial above). Then you select all as above, and use the pathfinder to crop. This worked for me anyway! Main thing is the removal of the align tool! Interested to know if this works for everyone. Just worked for me as said!
Thank you Bitt, its a very helpful tip, saves me a lot of time…….. thanks again.
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thanks for tutorial
but i want to give shadow effect out that that is some outside from artboard, when i crop and export, exported artwork not exat size shoadow area remail as a white area. so what can i do to cut like photoshop cut tool.
Kind of a stupid process for such an expensive program. They could have just made a simple crop tool. Sheesh. Way to waste time.
Should be…Crop and hit enter. done.
tutorial is just fine.. but still not impressed with illustrator crop tool.. they should look more in developing a simpler method of cropping artwork.. anyways thanks..