Speed Up Your Workflow With The Crop and Straighten Command In Photoshop
Photoshop comes with a number of automated processes which can help speed up laborious jobs. One such command is the Crop and Straighten. Say, for example, you’re working on a design project which involves scanning several items, such as photographs, documents, scraps of paper or other objects. Instead of scanning each one individually, you can place multiple objects on the scanner and Photoshop will do the hard work of cropping each one, straightening and then separating them out into individual images.
This command works best with images on a uniform background, which is not a problem if you’re scanning, and images with a clearly delineated outline. So here’s how to do it:
1. Open the scanned file that contains the images you want to separate. For this example, I have a flattened image with three pictures on it. You can see that the pictures are somewhat skewed.
2. Select the layer that contains the images.
3. (This is an optional step) If you don’t want to work with all of the images in a scanned file, then draw a selection around only the images you want to process.
4. Choose File > Automate > Crop And Straighten. Photoshop works its magic, and in a matter of seconds produces three new cropped and straightened images. Each image will open in its own window. Your original image is left intact.
As you can imagine, this is a major time saver.
Troubleshooting
If you find that the Crop And Straighten command incorrectly splits one of your images, go back to your original scan and make a selection border around the image and some background, and then hold down Alt / Option as you choose the command.
This will tell Photoshop that only one image should be separated from the background and will prevent splitting.
I use this command quite a lot and find it dramatically reduces the time I would otherwise spend on cropping, straightening and setting up new individual files. Do you use this or any of the other automated commands in Photoshop? What others would you recommend?
