One of the common queries that people ask us, when they’re starting off with Adobe Illustrator, is how to crop an image. Cropping an image is one of the basic tasks that most people expect to get done.

While there is no “Crop tool” in Illustrator, and am sure that you do understand why. Cropping is easy to do then its a bunch of pixels that you need to remove. But in the case of vector artwork its not that simple. Simply removing the anchor points and paths outside the desired area does not sound like a good idea to me. To preserve the design intent, we need to remove, or rather hide or mask, the content that we don’t need. In Illustrator, we have several methods to achieve an image “crop.” While, technically, we won’t be cropping an image, we can hide or mask the areas that we do not want. We can use Masks: Opacity masks and Clipping masks, and Artboards.

Erica Larson, created a series of videos to show you the how to use masks to crop an image.