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How to exclude contents outside of mask on the bounding box? (Rabbit hole of major UX issues)

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2024-07-04 00:58:31

I cannot figure this out for the life of me. I have even double-masked the layers, but still not working. What is the point of having the bounding box include clipped contents? I can't line up this layer with Smart Guides to other layers unless I flatten it, I can't resize this layer to a specific size that I need either because there seems to be no way around this bounding box. Exporting also includes the clipped off contents, which makes even less sense.

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What's even more odd, is CMD+click to make selection of the contents of the parent group (or any element for that matter) correctly selects the actual content. However, when using 'Export to Web' it still exports the bounding box... The same behavior applies to normal Export, sharing, everything. I just want to export the contents and not the clipped off contents?

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To top it off, if I'm exporting and choose to resize every edge of the Slice that includes the clipped off contents (which shouldn't need to happen), it won't snap to the actual contents of the layer, the clipping mask, or it's children, so I have to be pixel-perfect with that bounding box. It will snap to everything else BUT those things.

I can't rasterize the group either since it's destructive, and since I'm trying to export at 1x, 2x, and 3x, I genuinely have no idea what to do. I could just design this at the 3x size initially right? No, because Pixelmator doesn't allow you to input custom scales e.g. '0.25', '0.75', etc.

And I just discovered something I wish I knew forever ago: cropping layers using the Selection tool not only makes the layer destructive, but it actually rasterizes it at it's current size the moment you crop it/delete whats within the selection. Aspects of this make sense since Photoshop does this as well (I think?), but what doesn't make sense is that Pixelmator doesn't actually tell you if your layer is destroyed or not (e.g. smart object vs normal layer). There's no notification, prompt to confirm to rasterize your layer, icon/signifier that your layer is a 'smart object', anything. Please add something Pixelmator, I beg you.

Besides the destructive editing topic, please let me know if there's a way around the bounding box issue.