Automated Cropping and Straightening

Since nearly everybody (digital or not) has a shoebox full of family photos up in the attic, I wanted to include a tutorial on the Crop and Straighten Photos automation. Its name is a bit misleading, because it does much moreit lets you scan multiple photos at one time (on your flatbed scanner), then it straightens every photo and places each into its own separate window (saving you the trouble).

Step One

Place as many photos as will fit at one time on the scanning bed of your desktop scanner and scan them in. They'll all appear in one large document in Photoshop. As you can see, these photos were crooked when placed on the scanning bed, so naturally they appear crooked in the Photoshop document.

Step Two

Go under the File menu, under Automate, and choose Crop and Straighten Photos.

Step Three

No dialog will appear. Instead, Photoshop will look for straight edges in your photos, straighten the photos, and copy each into its own separate window.

Tip

If you've scanned a number of photos, but decide you only want certain ones to be cropped and placed into their own separate documents, just put a selection around those photos using any selection tool, and then hold the Option (PC: Alt) key before you choose Crop and Straighten Photos.

Step Four

This automation also works on single, crooked images. (Since the one shown here was taken with a digital camera, you're probably wondering how it got so crooked. I rotated it. Don't tell anybody.)

Step Five

When you choose Crop and Straighten Photos, Photoshop will crop and straighten this one photo, but it still duplicates the image into a separate document. Hey, it's not perfect. Speaking of not perfect, it seems to work best when the photos you scan as a group have similar tonal qualities. The more varied the colors of the photos are, the harder time it seems to have straightening the images.