In the last chapter, you learned how to get your photos into Elements. Now it’s time to look at how to trim off unwanted areas and straighten crooked photos. You’ll also learn how to change the overall size of your images and how to zoom in and out to get a better look at things while you’re editing.
Note
From here through Chapter 14, you need to be in the Elements Editor. If you’re still in the Organizer, press Ctrl+I/⌘-I to go to the Full Edit window.
Anyone who’s scanned printed photos can testify about the hair-pulling frustration you feel when your carefully placed pictures come out crooked onscreen. Whether you’re feeding in precious memories one at a time or scanning batches of photos to save time, Elements can help straighten things out.
If you’ve got a pile of photos to scan, save yourself some time and lay as many of them as you can fit on your scanner. Thanks to Elements’ handy Divide Scanned Photos command, you can save them as individual image files in no time.
Start by scanning in the photos (Figure 3-1). It doesn’t matter whether you scan directly into Elements or use the scanner’s own software. (See Working with PDF Files for more about scanning images into Elements.) The only limit is how many can fit on your scanner at once.
Figure 3-1. Consumer-grade flatbed scanners are generally pretty slow, so it’s a huge timesaver to scan four or even six photos at a time, since you can go do something else while the scanner works on the images. Elements can automatically separate and straighten individual photos in a group thanks to the Divide Scanned Photos command.
Tip
Sometimes it pays to be crooked. Divide Scanned Photos works best when your photos are fairly askew, so don’t waste time trying to be precise when placing them on the scanner.
When you’re done scanning, follow these steps:
Open your scanned image file in the Editor.
It doesn’t matter what file format you used when saving your scanned group of photos: TIFF, JPEG, whatever. Elements can read ’em all (unless you used JPEG 2000, in which case see About JPEGs).
Divide, straighten, and crop the individual photos.
Go to Image→Divide Scanned Photos. Then just sit back and enjoy the view as Elements carefully calculates, splits, straightens out, and trims each image. You’ll see the photos appear and disappear as Elements works through them.
Name and save each separated image.
When Elements is done, you’ll have the original group scan as one image and a separate image file for each photo Elements carved out. All you need to do now is import the cut-apart photos into the Organizer. To do that, just make sure that “Include in Organizer” is turned on in the Save As dialog box (see Saving Your Work).
Elements usually does a crackerjack job splitting photos, but once in a while it chokes, leaving you with an image file that contains more than one photo. Figure 3-2 shows you what to do when Elements doesn’t succeed in dividing things up.
Tip
Occasionally you may find that Elements can’t accurately separate a group scan, no matter what you do. In that case, use the Marquee tool (Selecting Rectangular and Elliptical Areas) to select an individual image, copy it (Ctrl+C/⌘-C), paste it into its own document (File→New→“Image from Clipboard”), and then save it. You might also want to check your scanner driver—it may have a way to divide a group scan as part of the scanning process itself.
Elements can also straighten and crop (trim) a single scanned image. Simply choose Image→Rotate→“Straighten and Crop Image,” and Elements tidies things up for you (choose Straighten Image instead if you’d rather crop the edges yourself). Better still, you can actually use the Divide Scanned Photos command (explained in the previous section) on a single image. (Cropping is explained on Cropping Pictures.)