How To Crop a Photo with Inkscape

[Music] this is Nick of logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can crop a photo using Inkscape and if you'd like to learn more about how Inkscape works be sure to check out the Inkscape master class which is a collection of over 50 videos where I go over every single tool and feature in Inkscape and I explain what it is and demonstrate how it works I'll put a link in the description of the video if you want to check that out so to get started here I'm going to open up Inkscape the first thing we want to do is just make sure that we set up our documents that we're all working with this similar setup I'm gonna come up here to where it says view we're gonna want custom selected and then I'm going to go to zoom going to zoom in at 1 to 1 and then I want to open up the the edit objects colors gradients and Stroke menu with this button up here or you could just press control shift F as a keyboard shortcut and what I want to do now is import my photo into Inkscape you can do that by going to file import and navigating to the file on your hard drive where the photo is located what I like to do is I like to just grab a folder like this and just click and drag it into Inkscape like that and I'm just gonna choose M bed if it asks you if you want to embed it or link it I just like to go with embed and there we go there's the photo I'm gonna be cropping let me zoom out a little bit I'm gonna hold ctrl and roll down the mouse wheel to zoom out a little bit what I'm gonna be doing here is removing the subject from the background here now before we get started I just have to mention that this is the sort of thing that would be better suited for an application like inkscape isn't really designed for working with photos like this it's more for vector design but if you don't feel like downloading if you're not a user and you don't feel like downloading and installing and learning how to use a new piece of software this can absolutely be done with Inkscape in fact i do this with Inkscape all the time so just wanted to throw that out there before we get started so let me get started here I'm gonna zoom in a little bit to zoom in and out again who's holding ctrl and rolling up and down the mouse wheel we'll be doing that a lot throughout this tutorial we'll also be moving the page around like this to do this I'm pressing down the mouse wheel and moving the mouse just basic navigation tools you're gonna have to keep in mind while working on this I'm gonna start over here about the lower right edge of the subject I'm going to grab the bezel which is over here or you could present beyond the keyboard and I'm going to click to create a point outside of the photo here and I'm going to start creating points going around the edge of the subject here just like this and if you notice these lines aren't exactly smooth they're not following the contours of the subjects outline here but that's okay we're gonna go back and fix that later so don't worry about that right now just go ahead and click to create these points going around the subject and this is a pretty big photo with a lot of points to create so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna fast forward and I'll catch up with you what I'm done okay so as you can see here I went around the outside of the subject here and I've traced an outline coming out to the other end of the photo what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna bring this line around outside the photo over here and connect it back to the starting point by clicking on that and it's gonna create a shape there like that if you notice now we have a shape going around the outline of the subject let me go ahead and undo that what we want to do now is we want to account for these negative space areas within this within the subject here assuming your photo does have these negative space areas if it doesn't don't worry about it but we're gonna have to eliminate these areas like between the hand and the shoulder over here and the same over here on this side so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create more shapes inside of here doing the same thing just creating following along the contours of the subject with the Bezier pen by creating points like that I'll put one right there another one here for the hair okay so once you're done accounting for all of the areas of negative space what we want to do is combine them all together by grabbing the select tool over here I'm gonna grab this area right here I'm gonna hold shift and click on the other one so that we can select multiples at a time I'm gonna hold shift click on that one and then hold shift and click on that one and you should have all of them selected if you shift-click them and what I want to do is unify them together by going to path Union and now what I want to do is take that group of unified objects and subtract them from the main outline that we created in the background over there so with this group of objects selected I'm going to hold shift and I'm going to click on the original outline and I'm gonna go to path difference and nothing is going to change visually on the screen but if you change the color of the object here you'll see it now fits the shape of the subject here if you see I missed that one so let me just subtract that as well path difference there we go okay so what I want to do now is I want to go back to where what I was talking about earlier with those rough lines I want to make them smooth so let me turn off the fill color of this and let me zoom in on this area over here where we started out let me go to the edit pads by nodes tool over here or a good pressed end on the keyboard let me just fix that one it's not quite right there we go what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click and drag over this node right here and I'm gonna click on this button that says make selected nodes Auto smooth and it's gonna make that node smooth so that it's no longer like a rough like a like a polygonal sort of corner it's gonna make it smooth I'll do the same thing with this node over here make that smooth and what we're gonna do is we're gonna go through and do this with all of these nodes but we're not gonna do this node by node because that would take forever what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select these multiples at a time by holding shift and clicking on them you can't select multiples at a time as I'm doing here just hold your shift and click and drag over them and make sure not to select any corner so let me show you what I mean I'm gonna come over here I'm not gonna select that node because it's a corner I don't want to make that smooth so with these selected let me make those Auto smooth and if you notice it's now smooth it now follows the contours of the subject they're a little more closely if you take a corner node and you make that smooth you're gonna end up with that we don't want to end up with that right there so let me undo that by hitting ctrl Z and I'm gonna go through and select more of these nodes making sure to avoid the corners like I previously mentioned let me see let me see how this looks okay good let me go through here and do this as well I'm gonna go through the entire image and do this with all of these nodes and then once again I'll I'll catch up if you when I'm done okay so I finished going through and smoothing out all of the nodes of the the outline here now we're ready to crop so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab the select tool I want to take this object right here I just want to give this a different color look I'm gonna make this green for example just so we can see what exactly will be cropping right here now what I want to do is get rid of that outline so I'm gonna hold shift I'm gonna click on this little red X down here in the bottom left corner and let me just bring the opacity of this down a little bit just so I can see I just want to double check and make sure that everything that I'm cropping out here looks good and everything it does it looks like everything looks good here looks like it's gonna be a clean crop so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hold shift and I'm gonna click on the object right there both the object in the photo we want them both selected and then we'll go to object clip set and if you notice they're the background of the of the photo is now gone in fact you can create a rectangle let me go to the rectangle tool right here create a rectangle grab the Select tool send this to the bottom and you can see we have our subject cropped out from the background now if any point you want to go back and remove this crop you just go to object clip objects clip release and it'll release it so you can go back to the original photo of how it was otherwise you can just leave it right there as it is and that is how you can go about cropping a photo with Inkscape if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 49,844

Keywords: inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape crop photos, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: ulvyKudgZPE

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020