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Crop/Scale/Square Artwork

This panel primarily allows you to crop an image. You can also scale and square an image. Depending on where the panel was opened, you may also be able to change the image encoding and attempt to compress the image. The image data returned by this panel is always extracted from the final image. Selecting Apply can change the size of an image even if no manipulations were performed. For that reason do not use Apply when you want to Cancel.

When fine tuning an image you can individually adjust the four edges of the image. You can manually specify an offset in pixels for each of the edges. Alternately, you can select an edge in the edge chooser control in the center of the panel. A slider with an orientation determined by the edge you select will be displayed. Move the slider control in the direction you want to move the edge. The original artwork item is displayed on the left and the modified item is displayed on the right.

When the current image is not square you have additional options. You can elect to Crop Square. In this mode the image on the right is cropped to the smaller of the width and height. The tuned or original artwork item, if no tuning took place, is displayed on the left and the squared image is displayed on the right. Dragging the slider you can move the crop frame within the squared image.

When fine tuning and the image is not square you can also select Square Canvas. This changes the current image such that the width and height are set to the larger of the two. There are five choices for this function:

Transparent Fill
The added area of the canvas will be filled with transparency. Note that if the image is being saved as a jpeg, the filled area will more than likely become white during the transformation. Note that this will only be visible after applying the changes in the modified artwork item. While in this panel, the added background will always appear as transparent.

White Fill
The added area of the canvas will be filled with white.

Black Fill
The added area of the canvas will be filled with black.

Custom Fill
The fill colour is displayed in the colour control to the right of the Square Canvas button. Clicking on the colour control will display a standard Mac color panel. You can select any colour or use the colour picker to select a colour from the screen.

Stretch
The image will be stretched to fill the added area.

When the panel is opened from the main window, Preview will show the cropped image in the Artwork Viewer. The Artwork Viewer will live update its contents when changes are made.

When the panel is opened in the Artwork Viewer, you will not have the Preview button or the ability to force the image format.

You can elect to scale the image down to a specific size when applying the changes. Note that you can scale the image even if its dimensions were not changed. A scale size of zero, implies do not scale. Note that Yate will not scale, or crop, images smaller than 32x32. The Preview displays the image prior to scaling. The scale value is retained when this panel is closed.

The Resolution control allows you set a resolution of No Resolution Change or 72, 144, 200 or 300 PPI without resampling.

When this panel is opened from the main window, you can force an explicit encoding for the artwork item. This means you can change a png to a jpeg or vice versa. This may be desirable if you use the Square Canvas functionality which might have a more appealing result on png images. Note that you can change the encoding even if the image's dimensions were not changed.

When this panel is opened from the main window, you can attempt to compress the image data. This test is always performed last. If after all other transformations an artwork item's size in bytes is greater than the supplied value an attempt will be made to decrease the size. The size may be entered as #, #kb or as #mb. # can be a positive integer or decimal value. Successive compression attempts are made to get the size less than the desired value. Note that if an attempt to lower the size is necessary, an artwork item which at the time of the test is not a JPEG will be re-encoded as a baseline JPEG image ... regardless of the previous transformations! FLAC files have a maximum image size of ~16MB. In order to make it easier to specify a value which meets the requirements of FLAC file encoding, the value may be entered as FLAC. You can enter a value of 0 to imply the initial image's size. There is no guarantee that the resultant size will be less than the specified value.

If you want to discard changes and start over, you can Reset. The image will be restored to the state when the window was first opened. All available process on Apply options will be reset to their default values.

Note that whenever you choose Apply, the image data is extracted from the image before saving. This might result in a change in the initial encoding of the image. If you have not made changes you want to keep, choosing Cancel is preferable.