Easy View Q and A: Crop Tool
Easy View® is an online design tool that is free for creating transfer artwork for t-shirts and other apparel.
It is easy to use and anyone can learn how to use it fairly quickly.
When Easy View was built, it was intended to be an easy alternative to learning the expensive art programs that professional artists use to create art.
Those programs are not as easy to use, are not as intuitive, and can take a long time to learn.
Easy View, on the other hand, has a lot of features but is more user friendly. It is a simple but powerful designer that is perfect for any artist and non-artist to use.
To keep it simple and for the purpose of creating t-shirt transfer art, it doesn’t have all of the tools though that other art programs may contain.
One of these tools is the Crop tool.
Once in a while we get asked if Easy View has a crop tool or get a suggestion to add one.
While Easy View does not have a crop tool integrated into it, there is a solution for what most of our customers want to use a crop tool for.
Below are just a couple of comments from customers that we see more often when the crop tool is being asked for:
- “Often when clients send art, it isn’t in vector format and there is the white background that you have to deal with. It sometimes prohibits getting a good estimate of the size because to have the art the size you want, the white background might be larger than the transfer size. If there were a crop feature that enabled me to remove the excess background, that would be great.”
- “When I add my own art, I would like to be able to get a selected area. For instance, I downloaded a picture that was scanned but I only needed part of the scan.”
In both of these scenarios, the crop tool is requested because of bitmap (or raster) artwork.
This is the type of art file when a crop tool would be most effective.
[Related Content: The Complete Guide to Image File Types]
The white background on a jpg image is a pesky problem for most raster images uploaded into Easy View. This is the most common problem that a crop tool is needed for.
The problem with the white background is that the artwork dimensions in Easy View are calculated using the edges of the image, which include all the extra white background space, as well, which is, of course, not the correct dimensions of the actual artwork.
However, there is a way that will fix both of these problems listed above.
How to Crop Your Image
Most, if not all, computers come with a default image browser tool. Most of the time, it will have an easy-to-use crop tool built into the application.
If you don’t have a tool like Photoshop, you can use this tool to crop your image easily.
Before you upload your file into Easy View, crop your image file first using this tool.
On a Windows computer, open your image using the “Photos” application.
You can do this by double-clicking on the image which should open it in the “Photos” application by default.
If you have a different application set as the default when an image is opened, you may need to right click on the image in your Windows Explorer window and choose “open with” and then choose “Photos” in the secondary menu that appears.
Once you have your image opened, click on the “Edit & Create” drop down arrow and select “Edit”.
With the “Crop and Rotate” option selected, drag in the crop lines towards your artwork.
Try to eliminate as much of the white as possible without cropping any of your actual image out.
Once you are happy with the new selection, click on the “Save a copy” button to resave your image.
Now, when you import your file into Easy View, you can see that the image dimensions are the size of your actual artwork, without any additional white background changing your image dimensions to make it incorrect.
You can use this same method if your image is scanned with multiple other images in the same file, such as the comment from the customer above.
Crop out the parts of the file you would like to discard and keep the image you want to have printed.
Then, upload that particular single image into Easy View to use to create your t-shirt artwork.