When you have a photo with white edges it’s a good idea to scan it on a black background if you want to easily crop and straighten it using an action and still retain the white edges.

On this practice photo called “Borders-WHITE-background-BLACK.jpg” I deliberately rotated the bottom left photo so it wouldn’t be straight and I skewed the bottom right photo so it wouldn’t be perfectly square. I’ll show you why in just a minute.

Open the Actions panel and under the Heritage Photo Actions choose Crop & Straighten-BLACK-background. Click the Play button and the action will do its work.

Here are my individual photos: The action straightened this photo that was crooked so it does a really good job with that, and all the photos were selected from the background pretty well except for the photo that was skewed. You can see that some of the black background was retained to make the side straight.

Since it’s not uncommon for heritage photos to be a little crooked, I build a safety feature into the action.

If you go back to the original photo and look on the Layers panel, you’ll see that I selected the photos from the background before separating them into individual photos. That way, if I see that the auto crop and straighten didn’t give me a perfect result I can copy the good selection from the original scan and paste it into the individual scan document.

To do that I’ll get the Rectangular Marquee tool, open Tool Options, and choose the New Selection icon, set the Feather to 0 and the Aspect to Normal and then click and drag an outline around the photo that didn’t quite get fully selected.

Press Ctrl C (Mac: Cmd C) to copy the selected photo, go back to the photo that needs it, and press Ctrl V (Mac: Cmd V) to paste it into the document as a new layer. If I click on the Visibility icon of the Background layer to hide it you can see that I no longer have the black around the photo.

Now all you have to do is save each of the photos as an individual file.

So that’s how to separate photos with white edges that were scanned on a flatbed scanner AND what to do when a photo is a little skewed and ends up showing some of the background.

When you have a photo with white edges it’s a good idea to scan it on a black background if you want to easily crop and straighten it using an action and still retain the white edges.

On this practice photo called “Borders-WHITE-background-BLACK.jpg” I deliberately rotated the bottom left photo so it wouldn’t be straight and I skewed the bottom right photo so it wouldn’t be perfectly square. I’ll show you why in just a minute.

Open the Actions panel and under the Heritage Photo Actions choose Crop & Straighten-BLACK-background. Click the Play button and the action will do its work.

So here are my photos. The action straightened this photo that was crooked so it does a really good job with that, and all the photos were selected from the background pretty well except for this photo—let’s make it a little bit bigger—that was skewed. It retained some of the black background to make the photo square. You can’t see it well because of the dark desktop, but if I hide the Background layer you can see the transparency around the top layer and the name of the layer says “Selected.”

If you use the normal command from the File menu to “Crop and Straighten Photos” in Photoshop, it won’t do this—you’ll be stuck with the extra background, but I built in a safety feature to the action by having it select all the photos from the background before telling Photoshop to crop and straighten them, and this is the result—it cropped and straightened but it also retained the selected photo layer.

Since it’s not uncommon for heritage photos to be a little crooked, it’s nice to have that safety feature!