Crop and framing

Summary

Crop, in Adjust, lets you trim a placed image by dragging its corner handles, then commit with Apply crop or back out with Cancel crop. Cancel crop works cleanly. In this session's testing, completing a crop consistently produced a broken result — see Warnings and limits before using this feature on work you care about.

Use it when

• You want to trim an image to a specific region without leaving the Builder.
• You placed an image at its native size (see Place vs. Fill canvas) and want to select which portion of it stays.

Before you begin

Select a single placed image layer. Crop is not available for shape, path, text, or template layers.

Steps

1. Select an image layer, then select Crop in Adjust.
2. Drag a corner handle on the artboard to resize the crop region. The inspector's W and H update live to reflect the new bounds.
3. Select Apply crop to commit, or Cancel crop to discard the crop and keep the layer exactly as it was.

What changes

• Cancel crop was confirmed to work cleanly: it exits crop mode with no change to the layer.
• Dragging a corner handle updates W/H live before you commit — for example, dragging the top-left corner inward changed a 7.50 × 7.50 in layer's preview to 6.26 × 6.26 in.
• Dragging from the middle of the image, rather than a corner handle, did not resize or reposition anything in testing — W and X were unchanged afterward. Framing a crop is done by adjusting the crop handles, not by panning the image behind a fixed window.

Print note

Crop is a pixel-level change to what's included in the layer, not a preview-only effect — the cropped region is what would be exported. Because of the issue below, this article does not confirm that a completed crop's exported output matches what the crop preview showed.

Warnings and limits

• Completing a crop produced a broken layer in every attempt during this session's testing — not an occasional glitch. After committing a crop (whether by dragging a handle and letting it complete, or in some attempts with no drag at all), Layers showed a new entry with no visible name — its selection checkbox is literally labeled Add undefined to selection internally. This new layer's Transform correctly showed the cropped size and position, but it had no Adjust section at all — no Crop, Contrast, Black point, White point, or Gamma — meaning you cannot re-crop or level-adjust the result. The original, uncropped layer was also left behind in Layers rather than being replaced. Filed as issue #32; treat Crop as unreliable for real work until that's resolved, and prefer Cancel crop plus a fresh Place image/Fill canvas at the size you want if you need a specific frame.
• Given the above, save or duplicate your work before trying Crop, and check Layers immediately afterward for an unexpected extra entry.
• This article does not cover exported output fidelity for a completed crop, since a normal completed crop could not be produced in testing.

Desktop and mobile

Crop, Apply crop, and Cancel crop are reachable the same way on desktop (inline in Adjust) and mobile (the Adjust sheet from the bottom bar) — both were confirmed present in the mobile sheet's markup. The crop-completion issue above was only tested on desktop; it was not independently re-verified on mobile, but there is no reason to expect the underlying layer-naming behavior to differ by viewport.

Troubleshooting

Related topics

• Place vs. Fill canvas
• Effective DPI and resolution warnings
• Size, position, rotation & opacity
• Contrast, black point, white point & gamma

Verification note

Verified against Blotter Builder on 2026-07-20.

Source notes

Primary observations — all from the live application at https://blotterbuilder.tdl.fyi, 2026-07-20. Each attempt below started from a cleared localStorage and a fresh page load, run as a single uninterrupted script, to rule out cross-session state contamination.

• Observed — selecting Crop on a selected image layer replaced the Adjust section's normal contents (Crop, Contrast, Black point, White point, Gamma) with Apply crop/Cancel crop, and added drag handles to the artboard.
• Observed — dragging the top-left corner handle inward updated W and H live from 7.50/7.50 in toward 6.26/6.26 in before any commit action.
• Observed — dragging from the middle of the image (not a handle) left W and X unchanged, and crop mode ended without a visible Apply/Cancel click having been made by the script.
• Observed — Cancel crop, selected directly after entering crop mode with no drag, cleanly exited crop mode with Layers unchanged.
• Observed, repeated across independent clean attempts — completing a crop (via a corner-handle drag, or in some attempts with no drag) consistently added a new Layers entry with an empty name button and a checkbox aria-label of Add undefined to selection. This layer's Transform reflected correct cropped dimensions (e.g. W/H 6.26in, X/Y 4.38in matching a top-left-corner crop), but its Adjust section was entirely absent when selected. The original image layer remained separately in Layers, apparently unmodified. Filed as issue #32.

Verification log