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Unfortunately, it is not possible for even a professional and highly experienced photographer to take perfect images all the time. Many times, photographers fail to hit the bull's eye. More often than not a captured image has several unwanted things within its frame, which makes it look a little vague. Sometimes, lighting arrangements along with the shooting location doesn't go with the theme of the image.  This makes it essential to edit the image for making it suitable for the purpose it has been shot. Several image editing applications are out there, one of which is the clipping path. This application provides a lot of liberty in editing different parts of an image separately.

Clipping path is a kind of vector path that allows an image to show a specific part of it for editing, while hiding rest of the part. The part of an image which is usually hidden by the application of this photo editing service is its background. By function, clipping path to an image editor program is just like the mask is to an illustration program.

With the help of clipping path, a user can easily make a specific part of an image opaque while rendering the rest of the image transparent. This technique can also be used to change a bitmap image's rectangular-shaped boundary into a desired shape of the user. Pen tool of Photoshop is used to create a clipping path. Path is a vector object, while the image is in bitmap. Hence, both these objects, i.e. bitmap image and vector path, can be exported together as an EPS file. This file format allows the two objects to show themselves in a single image.

Now a page layout document can be used to place this EPS file in it, where the page layout document can be created in Adobe® PageMaker® or QuarkXPress™ or in some other similar programs. However, a user can also embed or link this EPS file in a certain vector drawing file, like the one created with Macromedia® FreeHand®, Adobe Illustrator® or CorelDraw®. Otherwise, one can use a PDF file (Adobe Acrobat® Portable Document Format) with Adobe Acrobat Distiller™ for distilling the EPS file. Irrespective of the program used for editing the EPS file, clipping path is no doubt a great application to knockout an image's background.