Clipping Path
Among the many great things Photoshop allows you to do is to select a part of an image and designate it as a “clipping path” , which is used to separate images.
For example, when a photographer takes shots of items to create a catalog and a designer needs to separate the image from the background. It is quite a painstaking manual job, so it only makes sense that when images are processed with a clipping path that the path be preserved for use during processing.
The good news is that Graphics Mill supports clipping path in JPEG and TIFF images saved by Photoshop. Let’s see what clipping path capabilities it has.
Preserving clipping path
Photoshop saves clipping path data using Adobe Resource Block also known as 8BIM. Graphics Mill allows the reading of these blocks from JPEG, PSD or TIFF files and the copying them to other images. So if you convert, say, TIFF to JPEG, you can just copy it’s clipping path data and it won’t be lost.
Updating clipping path data
A common issue faced by developers when manipulating images is that copied clipping path data doesn’t always work well. For example, if an image is resized, rotated or croped, the clipping path may become invalid. With Graphics Mill, you can apply transforms on the clipping path data as well as the image, and the clipping path will be resized, rotated or cropped along with the bitmap.
Receiving vector path from clipping path
With Graphics Mill, you can get access to the vector data of the clipping path. In other words, you can work with it as with a set of curves. This allows you to visualize the clipping path on the screen.
Converting clipping path to a raster mask
Last but not least, you may want to use the clipping path as originally intended, i.e. to remove the background. To do this, you can convert the clipping path to a raster mask and use it as the bitmap’s alpha channel. This will make the background fully transparent.