The Photopia Blog
Tips, tutorials & inspiration for making slideshows
AUGUST 15, By Photopia
Cropping Layers vs Content
Cropping images is a common adjustment that can give your slideshows a more professional edge. Crop settings for layers are available for both Layers and the Content. Each of these provides a unique way to apply crops to your images. Read more to learn about these differences.
After selecting a layer from the Layers tab in the Navigation Panel, Crop settings can be found at the very bottom of the Adjustments tab in the Options Panel. Click on Edit to open the Crop Settings window.
Custom crop regions can be set by clicking and dragging any yellow node located on the outer edges. The crop area can be repositioned by clicking inside the lightened area and dragging it to a new position.
There are also preset Aspect Ratios provided in the drop down menu. After a preset is selected the nodes can still be adjusted to change the size of the crop, but the shape will be constrained to the selected aspect ratio.
Some effects include duplicate layers of the same image, such as the reflection in the example shown above. Cropping a layer only affects that individual layer and none of its duplicates.
The Content tab is a list of image sources. Layers get their source image from the Content list. One entry in the Content list can be the source for multiple layers. When an image from the Content list is cropped, that crop is applied to all duplicates in the slide that use that image source.
If the duplicates are assigned different Scaling (one “Fit to Frame” and one “Fill Frame”, for example), there will be multiple tabs available in the Content Settings tab so each Scaling variant can be cropped separately. This can be useful if your slide uses a duplicate of your image as a background, for instance, so the background image can have a different crop than the foreground image if those layers have different Scaling. All duplicates with the same Scaling settings will share the same crop from the Content Settings Tab.
