Cropping & image frames

Every placed image is really two things stacked together: a bitmap, and a frame that shows part of it. Once you can tell them apart, cropping and framing stop being mysterious.

Crop, frame and scale are three different things#

It helps to name what you're actually changing:

• The crop window decides which part of the bitmap is visible. Cropping never touches the source pixels — it just hides the rest.
• The frame is the box the image sits in, with its own Background, Stroke (border) and corner Radius — just like a shape.
• Scaling changes how big the whole image is on the Canvas. Dragging a corner handle scales the frame and its contents together; it doesn't re-crop.

Keeping these separate means you can, say, crop to a face, round the frame's corners, and resize the result without any of the three interfering with the others.

Entering crop mode#

Select an image, then open Properties and click Crop (the scissors icon). You can also just double-click the image to jump straight into cropping.

Crop mode focuses everything on the image: the rest of the Canvas dims to 25%, and a dashed overlay rectangle appears over the bitmap marking the visible region.

Adjusting the crop#

Drag the handles on the dashed overlay to set exactly what shows. The window can't reveal anything past the edges of the bitmap — you're always choosing a region inside the available pixels. If the image is rotated, the overlay follows the same angle, so the crop stays true to how the image sits.

To reposition the picture within a fixed crop, use the fit controls covered in Adding, replacing & fitting images.

Applying or leaving crop mode#

When the visible region looks right, click Apply to bake the crop window. Leaving crop mode returns you to the normal Select tool and reselects the image, ready for its next edit.

Tip: Because crops are non-destructive, there's no penalty for cropping tight now and loosening it later. The full bitmap is always still there behind the window.

Resetting a crop#

Changed your mind? In Properties, click Reset crop (the circular-arrow icon). The full bitmap drops back into the frame at its original extent. Nothing was ever discarded, so a reset is always lossless — you can crop, reset, and crop differently as many times as you like.

The image frame#

Below the fit and crop controls, a placed image has its own frame styling — the same Background and Stroke you'd find on a rectangle. This is what makes an image feel placed rather than just floating.

Background fill#

The Background color paints behind the bitmap. You'll see it wherever the image itself doesn't cover the frame: through transparent (PNG) pixels, and in any letterbox gap left when the content doesn't fill the box. It supports a solid color, a gradient, a spot color, or None. For how these fills work everywhere, see Fill, stroke & background color.

Border#

Give the frame a border with a Stroke color and a Stroke width. If you enable a border while the width is still 0, Popcorn Editor bumps it to 1 automatically so you can actually see it — then adjust from there.

Corner radius#

Set a uniform Radius to round the frame, or expand the Individual corners toggle to enter separate values for each corner (TL, TR, BR, BL) — exactly the same control a rectangle uses. The radius rounds both the bitmap and the border around it, so a rounded photo and its frame always match. There's more on rounding in Rectangles, ellipses & corner radius.

What's next#

With the image cropped and framed, you might want to lift it off the page with a shadow or soften it with a blur — the Effects controls in the Properties panel handle that. Or, if you're printing, check that your bitmap is sharp enough in Adding, replacing & fitting images.