Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Rotating, Resizing, and Saving

Last chapter, you learned how to get your photos into Elements. Now it's time to look at how to trim off unwanted areas, straighten out crooked photos, and save your files. 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

Windows folks: from here until Chapter 14, you need to be in the Elements Editor. If you're still in the Organizer, press Ctrl+I to go to the Standard Edit window.

Straightening Scanned Photos

Almost everyone knows the frustration of carefully placing a photo on a scanner, only to find that your scan has come out crooked. Elements includes a wonderful command—Divide Scanned Photos—that solves this problem. Not only that, but you can scan several photos at once, and Elements straightens them out and chops them apart for you. Anyone who's slogged their way through digitizing generations of ancient snapshots will testify that this a very big deal indeed, almost worth the whole price of Elements.

Figure 3-1 shows how you can use Elements to help save time. Put as many photos on the scanner bed as you can fit, and once you've gotten your scan into Elements, you can use Divide Scanned Photos to separate and straighten the individual images.

Start by scanning in a group of photos. The only limit on the number of photos is how many you can fit on your scanner. It doesn't matter whether you scan directly into Elements or use your ...