GraFx Studio Adobe® Photoshop® plugin: Clipping masks

A clipping mask is a shape that crops an image so only the part inside the shape shows through — a common design technique in Photoshop®. GraFx Studio supports clipping masks natively on image frames, and version 1.4.0 of the GraFx Studio Exporter for Adobe® Photoshop® now preserves them on export: clipping masks set up in Photoshop® arrive in GraFx Studio as Studio-native clipping masks.

✨ New & Improved

Clipping masks on image frames

The exporter translates Photoshop® clipping setups into Studio-native clipping masks:

• Built-in shapes — images clipped with a Rectangle, Ellipse, or Polygon are exported as Studio clipping shapes, including corner and stroke properties.
• Custom paths — images clipped with a custom path are converted to a path-based clipping mask in Studio.

Stroke color and width on clipping masks are preserved, as are corner properties.

A preflight warning is shown for every document containing clipping masks

A clipping mask in Photoshop® is effectively an object with a fill, which is normally invisible. If the mask extends outside the clipped image, Photoshop® shows that overflowing fill — GraFx Studio does not. The plugin doesn't check whether a mask actually extends outside its frame, so it shows one global warning whenever the document contains at least one clipping mask. If your masks stay within their frames, you can safely ignore it.

Known limitation

Merged shapes, combined shapes, masks applied to a group of layers, and complex paths (for example multiple unconnected paths or a path containing another path) are not yet supported and are flagged in preflight.

More info

See the GraFx Studio Exporter for Adobe® Photoshop® documentation for installation, usage, and the full feature support table.