In the Sides Prefs area, hwere you can define Background/Freground images for fixed sizes, there is now a new option.
It is named
Print Mask Image and, just like BG/fG, can be both a raster and a vector.
That image will essentially work the very same way as of the Foreground image, but with one important difference.
While BG/FG are meant to be visible to customer in the designer (for example, to create overlay effects of visual cropping masks), the
Print Mask Image will be not.
If present, the only place where it will be used is the hi-res generation of an order.
For this, in the
HI-RES FILES GENERATION area of orders, there now a new option too, named
Exclude Hi-Res Mask Image (if any)?, defaulted to NO.
Long story short, this new image can be used to appy a crop mask to your hi-res directly, so that you can obrain a print-ready file in case it needs to be cropped to a shape (typical examples could be shaped stickers).
Even if a similar result could be obtained by using the
Include BGImages (if any)? option too, that wasn't good because often BG/FG image are not meant to be print friendly, but USER friendly.
This new image, on the other hand, is being used exclusively by you, so it can be as simple as a white/transparent crop mask to be applied on top of the final file.
To be sure everything is extremely clear, let me describe a possible real example.
Let's say your product is a heart-shaped sticker.
For the size, you can now have:
- a BG image, heart shaped, with and opaque texture around and the heart shape transparent.
This will allow you to change the BGcolor only in the area of the heart.
- a FG image, heart shaped, with 80% opacity white around and the heart shape transparent.
This will allow to slightly "gray out" items moved outside the shape, and visually it's a cropping mask for users too
- a
Print Mask Image image, vector, with full white around and the heart shape transparent.
This will allow hi-res files created in your admin panel to be, at the end of the process, cropped to the shape defined by this file.
In general, this is meant to speedup the creation process of files in need to be cropped to a specific mask before being printed.
Enjoy!
