Cropping and Straightening Photos in Photoshop

Crop And Straighten Photos is another great Photoshop feature that you can use to perform one of the most mind-numbing production tasks. If you’ve ever gang-scanned photos before (that is, placed multiple photos on a flatbed scanner and scanned them all at once), you’re familiar with the grunt work involved after the gang image is imported into Photoshop. With each gang-scan, you’re forced to spend valuable time selecting each image, copying and pasting it into its own image window, and cropping and straightening it. This grueling task could take up the better part of a week when scanning in hundreds of images for a catalog, book, or magazine layout.

A much faster way to go about this task is to gang-scan your images over a solid-color background—making sure to leave at least 1⁄8˝ of space between them—and then choose File --> Automate --> Crop And Straighten Photos. Photoshop automatically detects the image boundaries and duplicates each one, fully cropped and straightened into its own image window. To crop and straighten specific photos from within a gang-scan, you must select each one with the Rectangular Marquee tool before applying the Crop And Straighten Photos command. You can also apply the Crop And Straighten Photos command to individual, single-photo scans.