Problem with Cropping of old images

[ebbtide]

Hi, Here's the problem. I have thousands of scanned images of very old document pages that need to be restored using photoshop methods. The first step is to crop and straighten the images, ideally in a batch file. The photoshop automatic crop and straighten function does not work well or mostly does not work at all because its expecting multiple images that it is going to try to seperate. So when you give it a single scanned image that contains background distractions that include the scanner cover, or the book its scanned from, then the auto crop usually returns a bunch of files from this one image that include bits and pieces of the desired image. Is there a way of telling auto crop that there is only one image to find? Or can you recommend any outside software that would do the batch cropping? Or as a last resort is there a method to semi-automate the procedure where one file after another will appear on the screen automatically, I then manually do a rough crop and then the file gets resaved without having to do all the usual menu commands that take so much time. Time is critical since there are a few thousand images.

thanks for any suggestions, ebbtide

[studioj]

Well, the thing I'll do it's create an ACTION and then use the FILE/AUTOMATE/BATCH.

The thing it's, Wich ACTION SHOULD I CREATE?

Let's say your scans are right in the top of the scaner's glass but somehow in the middle, well, do a new ACTION and begin recording, run the FILE/AUTOMATE/FIT IMAGE...

Then adjust the size of the image to square proportions, this is same value for Widht and Height, easy.

OK, now you have done that, don't use crop, use CANVAS SIZE and make a size on the values you think that fit properly.

Choose save or Save as and stop the recording of the ACTION.

Now use BATCH on that, and MAYBE will help

[mistermonday]

Ebbtide, yes PS Crop & Starighten works ok when there are cleanly defined borders around the image but it can't always take the place of the human brain. For those images that you need to crop and straighten by hand, the following technique may save you some time because it only takes a few seconds.
Open the image and select the Measure Tool (this is the 3rd tool under the Eyedropper set of tools and can be selected by itting the I key and then Shift+I once or twice.
Next drag the measure tool along any straight edge of the photo (even though the straight edge is not vertically or horizontally oriented. Next do a Image>Rotate Canvas>Arbitrary. The 2 second short cut is Alt+I+E+A. It will display the angle that PS will rotate. Just click OK and you image will be straight.
Next if you are not going to mess with the resolution, just do a Ctrl M to select the rectangular marquee tool and select the crop area and do a Ctrl+I+P on the keyboard and you are done.
By the way, on the images that you automate and save for subsequent processing, you may want to save them as PSDs or TIFFs, otherwise you will loose image quality if they are jpgs. In restoration, you usually need to maintain all the quality you possibly can.
Regards,
Murray

[ebbtide]

Thanks Guys for the speed up solutions for cropping in PhotoShop. But like the commercial on TV where fast food isn't fast enough that's my problem. I have 3,000 images to crop and straighten. A program called photoELF has a much faster semi-automatic crop than PhotoShop. But its still a last resort. The thought is that if I can crop away the distractions then Photoshop can possibly do the straightening with what's left. At the moment I'm considering writing some code to do the crop since it is a rather well defined problem where there is only one image and it located in the inner most region of many distracting edges that photoshop can't handle.

thanks,
ebbtide

[studioj]

Does the scanned files are sharp enought or have the correct contrast to print or do the e-book? Cauze, if not, maybe you will have to open and work on 3,000 files and work one by one, and cropping may be something that you can do while you work on those thousand files.