Crop tool in Illustrator?

[BonnieSimz]

Is there a way to crop an illustration to make a thumbnail in Illustrator or do I have to do this in Photoshop?

I have an illustration I need to make a thumbnail out of. So I just need to crop it.

Thanks for your help!

[Mickey]

Kinda confused on what your asking, can you elaborate on this?

http://home.wi.rr.com/mygraphics/konceptcreative.jpg

[Broacher]

No. The only thing you can do is create a shape (or rectangle) and use it as a clipping mask for your object or group of objects.

Note that clipping anything-- vector or raster, does not 'remove' any of the extra info not seen. If you're looking to export only a small needed part of a much larger or more complex object, you risk handling a lot more data than you probably intended.

Also, I don't know why, but AI always uses the object being clipped to perform it's alignments, crop marks, anything to do with an object's boundary-- a real pain!

Also (another pain) is that rasterizing a cropped element always INCLUDES the unseen area, meaning you still can't just export as is without having to actually crop the thing in Photoshop afterwards.

Have I mentioned that CorelDraw does neither of these things? It treats a cropped object boundary as the boundary of the cropping curve. It rasterizes ONLY the cropped area. In fact, there's even a built-in, but hidden feature that allows you to convert a large cropped vector object (say, a portion of a large map) to a regular object that throws away the outside stuff (and converts outlines to paths in the process as they get clipped by the outside curve). Maybe there's a way to do this in AI via an export/import trick, but I haven't found it yet!

[style]

hi i would also use the clipping mask in ill,
or as you suggested yourself to take it into photoshop
another option would be to group all the different parts of the illustration and scaling it to the size required
good luck

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/instyle/sigi.jpg