Using rectangle crop
Description:
In this short tutorial, learn how to use rectangle crop to zoom in on the most important parts of your figure.
Summary:
Rectangle crop is perfect for reducing clutter, saving space and emphasizing the important parts of your figure. In this particular example, Shiz uses rectangle crop to combine 2 icons (0:05). Rotate the crop window to get the perfect crop every time (0:59). In another example, Shiz uses rectangle crop to create a comparison between the left and right side of the brain (1:50).
Meet the expert:
Shiz Aoki, CEO and co-founder of BioRender co-founder, shares her 10+ years of expertise as a distinguished science illustrator to help you bring your science to life - visually.
https://biorender.com
Overview
Hey, everyone. In this tutorial, we're gonna show you how to use the crop function in BioRender.
Now, for this particular example, Say you wanna take maybe the top of this left protein, the orange 1, and combine it with the bottom half of this more teal colored protein 18. How would we do that? Well, in some cases, we do have color options that have those combinations. But in the case that we don't, you can actually crop 1 and attach it to the other.
So let's go ahead and do that. I'm gonna select the icon that I wanna crop. So I've selected this orange 1. I'm gonna navigate up to the toolbar and select the crop. So what I can do now is sort of toggle the controls here. I can use the corners I can adjust, and it's a little tricky. I can't quite get to the middle of this kind of skinny part of the protein here because this other blobby shape is getting in the way. So what I can actually do is rotate this crop shape and then get a little closer to where I want it to crop.
So a lot looks good. I'm gonna click apply crop. And I could do the same for this half. But actually I'm just going to overlay this on top. And it's actually behind, so I'm gonna bring it to the front. And simply overlay it like so. There we go. Now I can zoom in to make sure that that's even. There you go. Perfectly aligned. And there you have it.
Now to maintain this as 1 piece, I'd probably select both right click and group it. And so now I've got a new customized icon that I've made. Now what you can also use the crop function for is of course left and right comparisons. Sometimes it's normal anatomy versus pathology. And so what you can do is, of course, take 1 half of the object and do the same opposite side for the other half. Then simply combine both. What we also like to do is usually add a dotted line to show sort of a time difference or before and after, perhaps. You can make that line a little bit thicker. Great. And you can adjust as needed. And there you have it. So that's a crop function. Hopefully, you can give that a try and let us know your thoughts.
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