Using circle crop

Description:

In this short tutorial, learn how to use circle crop to zoom in on the most important parts of your figure. 


Summary:

Circle crop is a space-saving tool that will focus your viewers’ attention right where you want it (0:05). Watch circle crop in-action to crop a group of cells (0:27). Discover more ways to use circle crop (2:05). 


Meet the expert:

Shiz Aoki, CEO and co-founder of BioRender, shares her 10+ years of expertise as a distinguished science illustrator to help you bring your science to life - visually.

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Overview

For this tutorial, we're going to go through how to use circle crop in BioRender.

So why would you use a circle crop? It actually mimics a nice microscope viewport. It also helps to save space, it focuses the viewer's attention to a particular area of your image, and it also cleans up the edges of an icon if it's a repeating structure. So let's get started. You can see that I have an icon. It's actually a grouped icon, so you can crop really anything in BioRender even if it's a group.

I'm going to actually look for a zoom premade icon here. Let me use this. And this is great. This is going to create a bit of a view port for us. And a guide inside which we'd like to crop this icon into. So that's a great starting point. I'm going to select the icon that I want to crop. Navigate up here to the crop button, and you'll see here I have 2 options: I have rectangle crop and circle crop. So I'm going to go ahead and try a circle crop. And then using these green nodes. I can kind of adjust to fit. I can, you know, zoom in to make sure that my edges are straight and clean. And now these edges might look a little different, the controls, depending on what version of BioRender we’re on but it should look pretty similar. I'm going to click apply crop and I've got a nice clean edge to that and I'm going to zoom out just to see the full picture. Great. And I can also undo that by double clicking in and, you know, modifying the inside of that object, you like. It's always editable, and then double click out.

Of course, you can cancel a crop by hitting reset, and that's going to undo the crop. Great. Now there's a couple of other ways you can use crop, of course, maybe showing cell to cell interactions. You can get pretty complicated, showing animal models, and an instrument setup. So try it out. That's the circle crop function, and we'd love to see what you create.

Due to continuous improvements in BioRender, the application may appear slightly different in some of our videos.
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