Toolbox: Arranging and Cropping Tools
Arrange palette
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This palette contains tools for sizing, moving turning, and changing the order of sprites in the stack. Tools to crop or extend the bounding box of a sprite are also included, as are three interactive warp tools. You can also group and flatten selections. When you group a selection of sprites this keeps them together when they are moved and also when some functions are applied. For example if you run an Effect on a group, you usually need to flatten the group. Flattening a selection creates a single sprite out many.
You can use the tools on the Arrange palette to perform a variety of actions on a selected sprite, a set of selected sprites, or a group of sprites.
| Action you can perform | One sprite | Many sprites | A group |
| Align sprites with each other | No | Yes | No |
| Align sprites with the composition space | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Crop a sprite | Yes | No | No |
| Extend the bounding box that surrounds a sprite This action is particularly useful when you need to select two sprites for a texture transfer, and their bounding boxes are the exact same size | Yes | No | No |
| Flatten sprites | No | Yes | Yes |
| Flip a sprite | Yes | Yes | No |
| Group a set of sprites | No | Yes | No |
| Reorder a sprite’s position in the stack | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Resize a sprite | Yes | No | No |
| Rotate a sprite | Yes | No | No |
| Set or lock the position of the sprite in the composition | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Warp a sprite to change its perspective , its slant, or both | Yes | No | No |
| Ungroup or explode a group of sprites | No | No | Yes |
The arranging and cropping tools allow you arrange the order of sprites (move them
toward the front or back of the composition), to rotate and flip sprites, or to crop and extend them. Use the cropping tool to remove unwanted portions of image -- you can crop by either dragging the guide marks around the bounding box of the sprite, (see picture on the left) or by specifying the height and width you want.
If instead of cropping you extend the sprite by making its bounding box larger than the image it contains, you will increase the clear (transparent) space around the image. To extract a central portion of the image, or to create a differently shaped image from some portion of the existing image, you can use the ?extract tool instead.
Find out How-to use the Arrange Palette-Cropping and Resizing Images.
In the Image composer Help Topics (Alt, Shift+ H) if you put in the following headings in 'Find'. The rest of the actions detailed above, are covered in more depth.
Aligning sprites with each other
Aligning sprites with the composition space
Changing the order of sprites
Exploding a group
Extending the bounding box of a sprite
Flattening a selection
Flipping a sprite
Grouping sprites
Locking a sprite’s position
Rotating a sprite
Setting a home position
Ungrouping sprites
Warping a sprite
