how can I crop photo in illustrator and cant use magic stic in it??? please help

how can I crop photo in illustrator and cant use magic stic in it??? please help

the Magic Wand tool works on bitmaps in Photoshop. You can use the clipping mask tool (under object) to crop the appearance of a photo but it just hides the cropped part of the image. To use the clipping mask tool, just draw the crop on top of your photo, select the shape and photo, go to clipping mask..make. The entire photo is still there and can been seen by reeling or editing the clipping mask.

Is there any way to actually crop it? I.E. crop it so when I export the picture back out it's dimensions are changed, not just the parts I don't want rendered invisible?

Do that in Photoshop or other photo editing program. Illustrator is not a photo editing program unless you feel auto tracing is editing. In general, vector editing is done in Drawing programs and pixel editing is done in Paint programs. So you pretty much need to have both Illustrator and Photoshop. For long text heavy projects you need a page layout program, i.e. Pagemaker, Quark Express, and Indesign. This is why Adobe can sell the Creative Suite bundle. You need to crop and finalize your photo in Photoshop then bring it into Illustrator. I hope this helps.

It does help, thanks. I only have illustrator (should've saved up a bit longer to buy the suite!), so I wondered if there was a nifty trick to force it to be a photo-editor. Oh well, I can get most of what I need to done

You should use clipping mask

The magic wand in Illustrator is for vector objects, not bitmaps. The magic wand tool in Photoshop selects pixels. If you crop, scale and adjust color in photoshop, you will not need to use a clipping mask. An Illustrator file with many scaled and clipped photos tend to get large and unwieldily (with high resolution images). If the Illustrator file is then saved as an eps file, the bounding box will reflect the larger hidden clipped image. The larger file may also consume more time when printing as the whole image is processed then clipped.

It does help, thanks. I only have illustrator (should've saved up a bit longer to buy the suite!), so I wondered if there was a nifty trick to force it to be a photo-editor. Oh well, I can get most of what I need to done

I know you replied to this thread back in May, but just letting you know you don't need Photoshop to crop images You can use MS Paint if you have a Windows PC. Or there are many free online tools that can crop images too, like this one: www.cutmypic.com

In my case the Magic Wand functions properly over the clipped (Clipping Mask) image immediatelly in AI (CS3).