Now the best and most common tool for crapping and straightening an image in all of Photoshop has always been and continues to be the crap tool. But before I have you select it, I want you to open up this image here. It is called crookedscan.jpeg, and it is inside the Lesson 5 folder, which is inside the Part 1 folder, which is inside the Project Files folder that you installed from the DVD included with the series onto your hard drive.

And, this is actually and old scan of my self and my sister couple of days ago, actually years and years ago. And it is at something of an angle, do not know if you can make that out, and it is also of course got all these black stuff around the edge. We need to get rid of all that junk and straight it, make it reasonably decent.

So, I am going to go get the crap tool here inside the toolbox. It is a third tool down on the left hand side. Or, you can press the C key, C for Crap and it turns out inside Photoshop, you can select all of the tools from the keyboard just by pressing alphabetic keys. As well see, all of them are taken.

Anyway, get the crap tool. Here is how you use this tool. Just start by dragging around the portion of the image that you want to keep. Now, that is kind of a difficult thing to decide at this point since it is like well, no matter what, I cannot make this completely cat - a - wompos thing fit inside of a rectangle. Do not worry about it too much. I will point out that as your dragging, notice that you are scaling the crap boundary as you drag. I have yet to release my mouse button.

As you are dragging, you can press the Spacebar. If you press and hold the Spacebar while your mouse button is down, you can move the crap boundary to a different location on the fly, is soon as you release the Spacebar, I still have my mouse button down and drag some more, you will see you will return to scaling the crap boundaries, so that is just little trick to keep in mind when you are using this tool.

Not essential because you could always scale this tool after the fact, after you release. Okay, so here is what you do. Just drag anything. Does not matter what you are dragging. Does not matter how big you make this mark key because no matter what, it is not going to fit. So just go ahead and drag it to some sort of size here and release.

Now, what we are seeing right now is this boundary. Everything inside the boundary will be kept. Everything outside the boundary will go away.

Now, I want to be able to read what is outside the boundary a little better. Currently, it is covered up with this shield. Notice, there is a shield turned on, the shield option here in the Option’s bar. If I turn in off, things sort to brighten up outside this mark key, but it is very subtle. I will turn it back on. You will see it sort of darkens up there, and that is because the color that you use as the shield is black.

Well, this area outside the slide is completely black which happens with slide scanners. When the light shines through the slide, you can see the colors, but it cannot shine through this opaque area outside the slide so that appears black.

So, we got black on black going right now. That is no good. So, click on the black color swatch. They are in the Options Bar and what I would like you to do is change it to some other color, really does not matter. I am just going to click in this blue portion of the spectrum. This is inside color picker dialog box. The spectrum here in the middle of the dialog box represents all the colors in a rainbow, all the hues to be more accurate. And then we will see the square that is full of different saturation levels, different brightness levels and so on. I am just going to click a little higher so that we get this nice rich blue. Now, we can see the shield pretty nicely, maybe a little bit too much, but that is okay.

I will go ahead and click Okay to accept my change, and then, I will reduce my opacity value. This determines how opaque the shield outside the crap boundary is. I will click on the right pointing arrow head to bring up the slider bar, and I w