April 30, 2006

Scanning the past

Wired News reports on Kodak's efforts to develop high-volume scanning technology for old prints. These machines analyze the images, then categorize them & assign metadata by recognizing faces, print size & shape, handwriting, and more. Sounds like a cool & fairly painless way to get shoeboxes full of snapshots into a computer.

This reminds me of a little-known but powerful feature in Photoshop. The Crop & Straighten Photos command ("Lift & Separate" to its friends) is found under File->Automate in Photoshop CS and above. The command takes a bunch of photos scanned at once (like this) and turn each into a separate cropped, rotated image (like this).

Posted by John Nack at 9:54 AM on April 30, 2006

Comments

BWJones — 3:29 PM on April 30, 2006

Holy....... I did *not* know about the crop and straighten photos command and I've been using Photoshop since 1.0! It makes me wonder how many other cool features are hiding out in Photoshop......

[Heh--there's a lot of buried goodness in there. I aim to unearth more via the "Up from Obscurity" category. --J.]

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