How to prevent auto rotate when cropping

[JG_C...@adobeforums.com]

It appears in CS if you rotate a crop marquee 90 deg it will change the orientation of the image. In a landscape image I would open a landscape crop marquee, rotate it so the crop is now portrait, complete the crop and the finished image has changed from landscape to portrait.

I am trying to incorporate the crop into an action and would like to avoid having to change the aspect ratio for each crop. Is there a way to prevent CS from changing the orientation during a crop?

Thanks
Jim

[Don_Mc...@adobeforums.com]

Not unless you can program in dimensions somehow. The effect you describe is a feature ... used to rotate while cropping. It is also very handy for straightening a pix, when you rotate the crop only a few degrees to align a slanted picture.

[JG_C...@adobeforums.com]

Don: I'm fine with the feature of rotating the crop for alignment or other purposes. My problem comes from PS actually changing the orientation on the underlying image from P to L, or vice versa.

I found this out when I started shooting volleyball games where a landscape image is sometimes better cropped portrait. If I have a landscape image, open a landscape crop, rotate the crop marquee 90 deg to get a vertical crop, the resulting image rotates 90 deg. The result is the player, instead of being upright, is on his side.

Right now I have to go thru Dr. Brown's to re-rotate, it's a pain. I think PS should give us the option if we want the final image orientation rotated.

Thank you for your reply.

[Daryl_P...@adobeforums.com]

I'm puzzled...How the heck do you get the crop tool to also perform a rotation? I see only the perspective option and don't see anything that suggests the cropped image will be also rotated. Meanwhile, the Auto Crop and Straighten filter is just a one-shot tool that has no options on it for what I can tell.

Using the crop tool, I only see that you can rotate the crop marquee so as to change the orientation of the marquee before the crop is executed. That is, the image orientation is not affected at all.

What have I missed here?

Thanks,

Daryl

[LenH...@adobeforums.com]

Daryl,

>>What have I missed here?<<

The rotation feature? <g>

You can rotate the crop frame from the corner nodes (Cursor changes to
curved arrows)

[Lawrenc...@adobeforums.com]

Why don't you simply crop to the portrait version without using rotate? You can set dimensions in the Front Image selection. Your Width now becomes Height, and your new width whatever you want. Just be sure to delete the resolution numbers first.

Click Clear, click Front image then set your dimentions.

Or stay in clear and crop to your heart's content!

[Daryl_P...@adobeforums.com]

Len,

Maybe I've totally misread Jim's 2nd posting? While I realize you can use the handles to rotate and resize the crop marquee, it seems Jim has done something that is rotating the cropped content of the image. That is, how did his volleyball player wind up "on his side" from merely performing a crop?

Thanks,

Daryl

[LenH...@adobeforums.com]

Hi Daryl,

Looking into it a little more closely, in theory it should only tend to
rotate the image at angles up to 45 deg., so I'm not sure why Jim is seeing
quite what he is.

[JG_C...@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for all your responses. Here is what happens, you can try it for yourself.

Take an image, either portrait or landscape, and open a crop of either aspect ratio i.e. 2 x 3 or 3 x 2, or whatever size you want. Rotate the crop 90 deg by placing the cursor outside the crop box and spin the box 90 deg. Complete the crop and watch what happens to the image. I have done this a dozen times, a half-dozen different ways, and the image will rotate. So what started as ladder is now picket fence.

I can only assume PS does this because it thinks the image is off 90 deg to begin with. This may be the case with some cameras but mine (D2h) exports the image right-reading if you shoot vertical.

To Lawrence's point, the reason this is an issue for me is that I have an action that opens each image and pops in the crop box for me. Since I have hundreds to do at a clip, the one-at-a-time crop option, where I can select P or L crop orientation, really isn't much of an option.

My work-around is to use Dr. Brown's to re-rotate . . . just another step. I'm just having a problem figuring out why PS thinks this auto-rotate is a good thing, more importantly how to stop it.

[Daryl_P...@adobeforums.com]

OK, now I'm seeing the rotation. My problem was that I was following Jim's example, rotating a full 90° rather than some smaller amount. I guess I've never performed a crop other than one that would maintain a full rectangular image area, so I've never noticed that image rotation is performed. Regardless, when I do perform a rotation of the marquee from P to L or L to P and apply the crop, there is no image rotation at all. Seems to me you've got a very peculiar problem Jim...maybe you're on to something in speaking of these being digital camera images that are saved in a correct orientation. If the orientation is part of the EXIF data, maybe the Crop tool takes that into consideration.

Regards,

Daryl

[JG_C...@adobeforums.com]

That's interesting that i didn't happen to you Daryl. I just tried it on a gif (no exif) with the same results.

I am begining to think it has something with the straightening process because if I tip the crop box, say 45 deg, the image rotates by that amount. That is what I suppose you would expect it to do. But if you're not seeing the P to L problem, I may have my own little code demons. Thanks for looking at it.

[John_...@adobeforums.com]

I am guessing it has something to do with your camera's auto-rotation.

Indeed, rotating a crop marquee should not rotate the image.

What happens if you just draw a portrait marquee from the start, and don't rotate it?

[Lawrenc...@adobeforums.com]

I tried it on an image and the orientation did not change.

[JG_C...@adobeforums.com]

I have pretty much eliminated the camera as a source by using a non-camera image with the same results.

There is no problem if I do "normal" crops, or change the orientation from the double arrows in the crop toolbar. I think this anomaly is what it was designed to do because PS "crop-straightening" rotates the underlying image, so if you "straighten" it 90 deg, it will flip the image from P to L or vice-versa. If there was a way to turn crop-straightening off I'd be fine. My old platform had a dirt-simple way to manually straighten, so this wasn't an issue.

[Mick_...@adobeforums.com]

I must say I am very confused as I've never seen the behaviour you describe and I'm not actually very clear about what you are doing in any case.

But how about using a selection marquee with a fixed aspect ratio and then using the Image-Crop command instead of using the crop tool. This could be just as easily incorporated into an action.

[JG_C...@adobeforums.com]

Mick, what I an trying to do (and maybe you could try to replicate this) is to open an image and place a crop box inside of any aspect ratio, say 1 x 1.5. Rotate the crop box 90 deg by placing the cursor outside one of the corner nodes and rotating the box so the aspect ration is now 1.5 x 1. Once the crop is made, at least in my case, the underlying image rotates 90 deg.

The reason I am doing this is because I have added volleyball games to the website and, unlike football, it's common to have a image that was taken in landscape (three front players across the net) and want to take a vertical crop (player making the slam). Because I process hundreds at a time I have an action that opens the image and places a crop box in it. I adjust the size and placement and make the crop (the aspect ratio remains constant). I can do 100 crops in 10-12 minutes. This works great for football where 99.9% stay landscape.

The only way around this I can think of is to write an action that would ask for the aspect ratio for every crop. At that point I'm not sure if I might not be better off just living with it and doing the re-rotate thing in Dr. Brown's.

I would be real interested to know if you have different results from mine re: the first paragraph. There might just be something funky going on with my electrons. Thanks for your suggestion, I will try it.

[Daryl_P...@adobeforums.com]

Since I've apparently never used the crop tool in any sort of rotated crop, perhaps I continue to be missing something here. Basically, I am seeing exactly what I'd expect to happen...there is no flipping of the image in my case.

Jim, I performed a video capture of my use of the crop tool on an image I made up. The rendered video is poor quality since I wanted it to be short and relatively small for a web download, but it's still viewable as far as seeing what I do. The file is <http://jazzdiver.com/photoshop/crop_tool.wmv> (489KB). The file didn't play for me directly from the link, so you'll first have to save it locally.

Although I go through a variety of crops (applied with the Enter key and then undone), I think the 1st example is what applies most to your situation: Ignoring the square dimensions of the actual image file, the vertical colored lines are basically a landscape sort of orientation. Now, selecting a few lines in the center using a portrait crop and then rotating that 90°, the crop in a landscape orientation now encompasses more of the colored lines and it is those which remain when the crop is applied. With your example of the volleyball team, I'd have expected to see those original 3-4 lines that were first selected to be turned so they appear horizontal. Is that correct, or have I misunderstood something?

Continuing on with other crops in the video, everything pretty much did as I would have expected.

<edit> I overlooked Jim's earlier comment about the ladder transformed into a picket fence. Based upon that, I think I understand exactly what he's observed but am not experiencing that myself, as my video illustrates. While I would not expect such behavior, it is very puzzling that Jim is seeing this occur.

Regards,

Daryl

[Jake_...@adobeforums.com]

JG,

Does this help? With the crop tool selected, I found that if you click the 'front image' box to place values in the boxes, and then rotate the crop box, you get the behavior you mentioned (e.g. the image is rotated). However, if you click the 'clear' box next it so there are no values in the boxes, rotating the crop box does not rotate the image. In this case, it simply crops the image to the size and aspect of the crop box.

I'm not sure if this is intentional behavior or a bug. Let us know if that makes a difference.

Jake

[Daryl_P...@adobeforums.com]

BINGO! You nailed it Jake. Good work. I too get the same results, as I'm sure everyone else will. I've never used "Front Image" to insert the fill in the crop parameters. Frankly, I never saw much use for that button and hadn't read up on it until now. The intent for it is to copy the dimensions of another open image into the crop parameters, so that the aspect established by those values can be used in a crop performed on a second image. Apparently when used on the same image, it has the effect of what we've now seen here...rotating the full image. Bug? Feature? As you said, it's hard to be sure. At the very least, it does appear to be an undocumented behavior in the help files or user guide.

Daryl

[Mick_...@adobeforums.com]

I see now too. Never tried that before. I never normally specify sizes in the crop options bar. I don't think that this is the best way to crop because you are going to be resampling if you have specified the width and height for the crop (I can't see any way just to define an aspect ratio, it has to be specified in units). I think you would be much better to work with the rectangular selection tool where you can specify a fixed size in pixels or a fixed aspect ratio.

[Jake_...@adobeforums.com]

Cool! I got one right, for once. I'm glad we could solve it for JG.

Jake

[Daryl_P...@adobeforums.com]

Mick,

I tend to agree with you about how to best use the crop tool. However, where it can come in quite handy is when you want to quickly crop some hi-res images for web use. In such cases I always specify a fixed pixel size so the resolution is unimportant. Another time I'll use crop is when I know the image I'm working with has more than enough data and sharpness to support a print-quality, smaller image. For example, maybe it's good for 8x10 but I simply want some 4x6 crops at 300ppi. The crop tool is useful, but the user does need to be aware that resampling may be performed and consider the consequences.

Daryl

[Mick_...@adobeforums.com]

That's fine Daryl but I wouldn't be inclined to use it as a general purpose resizing tool in the way that Jim is using it as it doesn't give any real control. I don't normally need images with a fixed aspect ratio but if I was doing this a lot I would use the marquee tool and then run an action to resize them for web use. The Fit Image command is very handy if the images have different orientations.

[JG_C...@adobeforums.com]

Jake, you da man! That works great. The only thing missing was the loss of the aspect ratio caused by the boxes going blank. This was a simple fix. When I wrote the action I made sure the crop box was the right aspect ration (1.5 in my case). Then when you have to resize it you just hold the shift key while dragging a corner of the crop box, this resizes the box without changing the aspect ratio. Mission accomplished (just when I was about to give up!).

Mick & Darly, great input also, very helpful. In my case I don't care much about the quality of what gets posted, generally 100k. I have other actions that handle the actual web prep on the image, depending on what site they are going to. If somebody orders a print, I have the NEF (Nikon RAW) and hi-res jpegs keyed together so the lab can have whatever the lab wants for final processing. So in my final workflow I have a monitor-quality posting image, geared for speed, and an x-meg jpg with RAW original. It eats gigabytes for sure but it covers all the bases.

Thanks very much to all who offered input. I hope to be able to return the favor at some point.

Jim

[Mick_...@adobeforums.com]

Glad you got it worked out Jim. I continue to learn. I never knew the crop tool had this behaviour.

[JG_C...@adobeforums.com]

Just a quick note, for what it's worth. When rotating the crop box, if you hold down the shift key while rotating, the box will move in fixed 15 deg increments. Makes quick work of going from P to L.

[Lawrenc...@adobeforums.com]

Interesting. I use the Front Image (Strange name! Is there a Rear Image?) quite a bit, and so far as resampling, so long as you are using one of the sides completely, ther is no resampling. If you resize both H and W, then delete the Resolution numbers and PS will not resample.

[Daryl_P...@adobeforums.com]

Lawrence,

I thought "Front Image" sounded peculiar too, until I read about how the button is intended for use. If you have two images open, A and B, and you want B cropped to the dimensions and resolution of A, then you first click on A and select "Front Image" to capture the size/resolution info into the crop settings. Then, you return to B, to define and apply the crop. So, at the point where you're selecting "Front Image", image A is currently the front-most image in the workspace (if not side by side to B ).

It seems to me that if images A and B are of different resolutions, then image B would be cropped and resized so as to establish the same resolution as A whether you're "using one of the sides completely" or not.

Regards,

Daryl

[Lawrenc...@adobeforums.com]

That would appear to be so, Daryl.

I wouldn't be all that comfortable with PS diddling my resolution numbers. Nosiree bub!