Section 81. Crop and Straighten Photos in Photoshop

#81. Crop and Straighten Photos in Photoshop

Although digital photography has become increasingly popular these days, you may still find yourself scanning in some old photo prints on your flatbed scanner. But having to crop and straighten each print afterwards has always been a pain. Well, we can put all this tedium behind us now and let Photoshop's amazing Crop and Straighten Photos command do the work for us. This remarkable command not only automates the process of cropping and straightening your photos for you, it can do so to multiple images within a single scan.

Fixing Bad Splits

If Photoshop incorrectly splits one of your photos in a scan when you perform the Crop and Straighten Photos command, you may have to force Photoshop to work on that image separately. Draw a selection around the image and leave some of the background around it (usually white from the scanner lid). Then hold down Option/Alt as you choose the Crop and Straighten Photos command. This directs Photoshop to separate just that one image from the background.

Follow the steps below to use the Crop and Straighten Photos command:

1.	Place your prints on your flatbed scanner and scan them all in at once (Figure 81a). To get the best results, arrange your prints on the scanner bed so they are at least 1/8 of an inch apart from one another. It's also a good idea to disable any automatic adjustment settings your scanner software may offer since they often take into account the entire scanned image. You can always adjust the individual images in Photoshop once they've been cropped (and straightened) from the scanned file. Figure 81a. With the Crop and Straighten command, you can save time by scanning in several photos at once.
2.	Open the scanned file in Photoshop. If you want to apply the Crop and Straighten Photos command to specific images in the scan, make a selection around them.
3.	Choose File > Automate > Crop and Straighten Photos. Photoshop processes the scanned file, detecting the edges of each image, and then crops, straightens, and separates them into individual files (Figure 81b). Figure 81b. Once the Crop and Straighten command has worked its magic, you'll end up with a separate document window for each image.
4.	With each image conveniently cropped and straightened for you, you can then make any adjustments to them (see #27) and save them as individual files.