Illustrator images

Austin,

To start with, Illy shows the image at 72 PPI; you can add /8 to the W or H value in the Transform palette and press Ctrl/Cmd+Enter to have it show at 1/8th the size (306 x 408), or something similar, which will suit your needs. The original number of pixels in the image will be kept, with no loss.

Also, what size is the image before you bring it in and what size is your Artboard? I just sounds like its a large image and you are working with a small Artboard. So one of the two needs to scale. You can change the Artboard size two ways. 1 is...

1.     Choose the Artboard Tool.

2.     Double click on the Artboard tool in the tool bar, opening the Options window.

3.     Type in a more appropriate size for your Artboard to match the image size.

Or with the Artboard tool selected, you can just click and drag it out from the corners and resize the Artboard to whatever you would like.

Or you can scale your image a few different ways. The easiest is to just select it with the Black Arrow Tool (Selection Tool), Then just grab the corners and resize it.

Or you can select it again with the Black Arrow Tool (Selection Tool) and type in sizes that you would like it to be.

Oversize image, selected with the Black Arrow Tool.

Image scaled to fit using either by grabbing the corners and dragging, or by typing in a size in the W or the H spaces above (W = Width, H = Height)

Which version, which system?

Which kind of image?

What is huge? The filesize? The dimensions of the image?

Ans what do you mean with cropping? What exactly are you doing step by step?