Photoshop Elements 12: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Rotating and Resizing Photos

In the last chapter, you learned how to get photos into Elements. Now it’s time to look at how to trim off unwanted areas and straighten crooked photos. This chapter will also teach you how to change the overall size of 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 in Expert mode to follow along. If you’re still in the Organizer, press Ctrl+I/⌘-I to go to the Editor, and then click the Expert tab at the top of the screen.

Straightening Scanned Photos

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.

Straightening Two or More Photos at Once

If you’ve got a pile of photos to scan, save yourself some time and lay as many of them on your scanner as you can. It doesn’t matter whether you scan directly into Elements or use the scanner’s own software. (See Scanning Photos for more about scanning images into Elements.) Thanks to Elements’ handy Divide Scanned Photos command, you can save them as individual image files in no time.

Tip

If you have a Mac, Image Capture often automatically creates separate files for each image in a group scan, as long as it can tell them apart.

Start by scanning in the photos ...