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6.1.2 Crop section syntax ¶

When in image mode, one of the methods to crop only one rectangular section from the input image is to use the --section option. Crop has a powerful syntax to read the box parameters from a string of characters. If you leave certain parts of the string to be empty, Crop can fill them for you based on the input image sizes.

To define a box, you need the coordinates of two points: the first (X1, Y1) and the last pixel (X2, Y2) pixel positions in the image, or four integer numbers in total. The four coordinates can be specified with one string in this format: ‘X1:X2,Y1:Y2’. This string is given to the --section option. Therefore, the pixels along the first axis that are \(\geq\)X1 and \(\leq\)X2 will be included in the cropped image. The same goes for the second axis. Note that each different term will be read as an integer, not a float.

The reason it only accepts integers is that --section is a low-level option (which is also very fast!). For a higher-level way to specify region (any polygon, not just a box), please see the --polygon option in Crop options. Also note that in the FITS standard, pixel indexes along each axis start from unity(1) not zero(0).

You can omit any of the values and they will be filled automatically. The left hand side of the colon (:) will be filled with 1, and the right side with the image size. So, 2:,: will include the full range of pixels along the second axis and only those with a first axis index larger than 2 in the first axis. If the colon is omitted for a dimension, then the full range is automatically used. So the same string is also equal to 2:, or 2: or even 2. If you want such a case for the second axis, you should set it to: ,2.

If you specify a negative value, it will be seen as before the indexes of the image which are outside the image along the bottom or left sides when viewed in SAO DS9. In case you want to count from the top or right sides of the image, you can use an asterisk (*). When confronted with a *, Crop will replace it with the maximum length of the image in that dimension. So *-10:*+10,*-20:*+20 will mean that the crop box will be 20\times40 pixels in size and only include the top corner of the input image with 3/4 of the image being covered by blank pixels, see Blank pixels.

If you feel more comfortable with space characters between the values, you can use as many space characters as you wish, just be careful to put your value in double quotes, for example, --section="5:200, 123:854". If you forget the quotes, anything after the first space will not be seen by --section and you will most probably get an error because the rest of your string will be read as a filename (which most probably does not exist). See Command-line for a description of how the command-line works.