Chapter 3. Rotating and Resizing Your Photos

In the last chapter, you learned how to get your photos into Elements. Now it’s time to look at how to trim off unwanted areas and straighten crooked photos. 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

From here through Chapter 14, you need to be in the Elements Editor. If you’re still in the Organizer, press Ctrl+I/⌘-I to go to the Full Edit window.

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 a Time

If you’ve got a pile of photos to scan, save yourself some time and lay as many of them as you can fit on your scanner. Thanks to Elements’ wonderful Divide Scanned Photos command, you can save them as individual image files in no time.

Start by scanning in the photos (Figure 3-1). The only limit is how many can fit on your scanner at once. It doesn’t matter whether you scan directly into Elements or use the scanner’s own software. (See Working with PDF Files for more about scanning images into Elements.)

Consumer-grade flatbed scanners are generally pretty slow, so it’s a huge timesaver to scan four or even six photos at a time, since you can go do something else while the scanner works on the images. Elements can automatically separate and straighten individual photos in a group thanks to the Divide Scanned Photos command.

Figure 3-1. Consumer-grade ...

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