Erasing part of a JPEG image

Hi Christopher

What ClayUUID and JosephLabrecque already said is right. You best bet is to load your scanned JPEG into Photoshop or any other raster graphic editor and remove the unwanted image part there and then import it into Animate. If you want to use it there for an animation.

But you mentioned in your original post two things which make me wonder.

1. ".. used the Adobe Animator software to do an image trace .."
2. ".. then I go over to Modify and select break apart to break the image .."

Does case 1. mean that you used Modify/Bitmap/Trace Bitmap ... ? If that's the case you've converted your raster image (Bitmap) to a vector image (well, kind of). Then you could indeed use the Erase Tool to remove unwanted bits. But still, i wouldn't advise this method. It depents what kind of image your are dealing with. It sounds like a hand drawing you are scanning, so it might work well.

When you are going the case 2 line (break apart) then you can use the Selection Tools in Animate

• Selection Tool (v)
• Lasso Tool
• Polygon Tool
• Magic Wand

to select and remove (delete) unwanted pixels. Afterwards I would select all that is left over and group it or Modify/Convert to Bitmap ... or Modify/Convert to Symbol ... The latter might be necessary anyway if you want to use it in animation (Tween) in the Timeline.

Play around

Klaus

Animate is NOT a paint program. The erase tool is for erasing vectors, not pixels. You need to finalize your bitmap artwork in Photoshop or whatever before importing it into Animate. You can crop a bitmap in Animate, but it's like cropping in PowerPoint-- the entire uncropped image is still there, using up memory and slowing down load times.