Clipping Path is a form of masking or stenciling where you can draw an outline around your image where you want it to be visible, the remaining areas become transparent. The only drawback to this is that the ‘stencil’ or ‘mask’ has hard edges, you cannot have a ‘fading’ or gradual mask as you can with a Photoshop layer. It behaves in the same way as if you had physically cut up a photograph and removed a foreground image from its background. As with scissors, images masked with clipping paths have hard edges, there’s no feathering available.

Clipping paths are mainly used to hide the background of an image or to completely transform an image into any dynamically possible shape, thus making the masked segment transparent or to any color background. The main applications of Clipping images are flyers, brochures, catalogs, posters, magazines, e-commerce websites and practically any field where usage of images are regular.