Recently my grandparents died and they left behind boxes and boxes of photographs of our family history, some going back over 100 years (old black powder flash photos on tin plates). They family has requested that I digitize them all. Needless to say, that is going to be a lot of work. I have scanned many photos on flatbed scanners over the years and I have always wanted a software that could do multi-autocropping. Currently, I have to save the scan as a single file, and then open it in a photo editor and cut out each individual picture and save it. What I would like is a software that can detect and crop several images at a time from a single scan.
Is there a software to automatically crop a scan of multiple images? Luckily the answer is yes, have a look at the screenshot below: The scanned image can come directly from your scanner, or you can load a previously scanned image file into RansenScan.
Say I scan ten photos on my flatbed, the program would detect the edges of all ten photos and save them as individual files.Is there such a software?
Written by Steve Patterson.One of the things I love to do in my spare time is digitize old photos, scanning them into my computer so I can retouch them in Photoshop, then printing off newly restored versions of them or just saving them to CD or DVD for safekeeping. Of course, with no shortage of old photos lying around and a serious shortage of spare time, scanning, cropping and straightening each image individually can take too long.Fortunately, there's no need to do that thanks to an amazing feature first introduced back in Photoshop CS, the Crop and Straighten Photos command. With it, we can scan multiple images at once with our flatbed scanner, then let Photoshop automatically crop them, straighten them and open each photo for us in its own separate document, all in a matter of seconds!Here's how it works. First, place as many photos as you'd like (or at least, as many as you can fit) onto your scanner, making sure to leave some empty space around each one so they don't overlap. Photoshop isn't capable of actually scanning images, so you'll need to use either the software your scanner came with or a third party program like VueScan or SilverFast to scan the photos. Save your file in the TIFF format for best image quality, then open it in Photoshop.Here's my file after scanning four images at once.
Notice that I put no effort at all into making sure the images were positioned properly on the scanner (they're all crooked). The only thing I made sure of was that none of the photos were overlapping each other, otherwise Photoshop would run into problems when trying to separate them. Make sure you leave space between each photo when scanning so they don't overlap.At this point, all four photos are part of a single larger image, but what I need is for them to be separated into their own individual documents. I could separate them manually by drawing selections around each image, copying each one to its own layer and creating new documents from the individual layers, but then I'd still need to crop and straighten each one myself and I'm already getting bored just thinking about it.
A better way is to let Photoshop automatically do all that work for me!To do that, go up to the File menu in the Menu Bar along the top of the screen, choose Automate, and then choose Crop and Straighten Photos.