How to Crop in Procreate

With a touch of your Apple Pencil or finger, you can create unbelievable works of art in Procreate. One of the features of Procreate is the ability to crop images. Cropping images is a great way to focus on specific elements of the artwork, or to make the artwork fit certain dimensions. In this Procreate tutorial, discover how to crop in Procreate with these quick tips.

To show you how the crop tool works, we will be using this amazing Medical Worker avatar kit in Procreate V5.3.3.

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Step 1 - Create your Design in Procreate

If you have already created a design, you can go ahead and skip this first step. If not, create a custom sized canvas or import a design idea that you want to crop.

Have you seen the tons of Procreate brush sets available on Design Bundles? There is something for every kind of project, including stamp brushes for your Procreate drawings. We also have a great guide on how to install and organize your brushes.

We used the avatar set to create our Medical Worker character. This kit is just perfect for appreciation gift ideas.

After creating your canvas, go to the Actions menu or wrench tool, tap on Add > Insert a file. Do this for each part of the character that you want to add.

The kit is perfectly sized, you only need to reposition each element. Then, you can adjust the size of the design as a whole by selecting multiple layers and using the Transform or arrow tool at the top toolbar.

In the image below you can see in the layers panel the different elements that were added. Find out more about how to use Procreate layers with our very helpful guide. The avatar kit is so easy and fun to use, you can create unique characters in a short amount of time!

Step 2 - Use the Crop Tool in Procreate

We want to crop out the excess areas around the design. You can do this for a number of reasons such as printing more than one image on a single page for sublimation. Or, maybe you want to create stickers or need the design to fit a project of a certain size.

Procreate will crop the entire design, so you won’t need to worry about what layers are selected. Tap on the Actions tool, then tap Canvas > Crop & Resize.

In the Crop & Resize settings, you will find a small menu in the top right corner of the screen. When you click on the Settings menu, you have the option to change the dimensions of the canvas, DPI, Resample, Snapping and Rotation.

As we are only focusing on cropping the design, we would only change the dimensions, DPI and snapping. You will also get a brief view of how many layers you can create in this project. The smaller you make your canvas, the more layers you have available.

You can crop one of two ways in Procreate. The first way is to drag in the corner or side handles to crop out the area. Turning on the Snapping option will snap the crop bounding box to the edges of the design.

Sometimes this can work and other times not. As seen in the visual below, we used the snapping option but then turned it off to fine tune the crop box.

The second way to crop the design is to manually input the value of the dimensions under the Settings menu. After doing this, you can tap + drag the bounding box and reposition it where you want.

You can adjust the DPI to 300 but this won’t necessarily improve the quality of your print. To know the size of your print, divide the width and height by the DPI. For example:

Width - 1625 px ÷ 300 = 5.4 inches

Height - 2000 px ÷ 300 = 6.6 inches

By adjusting the dimensions, you should have a better print result.

The last step is to save your cropped design by going to Actions > Share and then choosing a format. Sublimation projects work great with PNG files but remember to remove the background in Procreate before saving.

Now that you know how to crop in Procreate, you can easily resize your images and make them fit perfectly into any project! We hope that this tutorial has been helpful and that you carry on to enjoy drawing in Procreate.