When using an action to select photos with white edges from a black background you’ll occasionally run into a problem. Let me demonstrate and if you want to follow along open the practice photo called “Borders-DECKLE-Problem.jpg.

Activate the Actions panel and in the Heritage Photo Actions set click on “Select DECKLE Photos-Multiple” and click the Play button. As usual I get the pop-up instructions telling me how to select and save each photo.

Now let’s activate the Layers panel and take a look at our image. Something is terribly wrong with one of the photos, right? But there’s actually another problem that’s harder to see unless you zoom in to get a closer look.

First let’s look at the obvious problem photo with missing pieces and compare it to the original photo by turning on the visibility of the Background layer.

Here’s the problem: Only one of the sides has a white border. The other three sides don’t have a white border to protect them from the black in the photo being selected and removed by the action. The action uses a Threshold filter that actually increases the amount of black in the photo and background so that’s why so much of the photo was removed.

If we zoom in even closer and add a layer of red below the Top S elected layer you can see that the edge of the photo on the left looks like a mouse has nibbled on it here and here! So what’s going on?

If we look at the original photo we can see that the black type of the date on the deckle frame is right up against the edge which means when the black background is selected, the black type is also selected and removed from the photo. To make things worse the action expands the selection by 1 pixel to avoid leaving any black along the edges of the final selected photo. So any black even one pixel away from the edge will also be selected and removed.

Now this doesn’t happen very often but I don’t want you to be blind-sided when it does, so if you see this go ahead and select and save the photos that aren’t affected and then you’ll have to use other methods to select the problem photos.

For example, when I used a different action, the one called “Crop & Straighten-BLACK-background,” I got a good selection of the photo that was missing so many pieces. So that worked out just fine and now all I have to do now is crop away the one deckle side so it doesn’t look weird.

Notice, though, how most of the deckle edges are gone or partially chopped off. That’s why I don’t normally use this action on photos with deckle frames.

For the other photo with the type problem I simply painted over the black type with the Brush tool using a fairly hard edge brush. I sampled the color of the deckle frame which is a light gray, made a new layer, zoomed in close, and painted over the type.

When I was satisfied I chose Layer → Merge Down. Then you can run the action again and it’ll work just fine.

So that’s how to trouble shoot when an action isn’t properly selecting the photos!

When using an action to select photos with white edges from a black background you’ll occasionally run into a problem. Let me demonstrate and if you want to follow along open the practice photo called “Borders-DECKLE-Problem.jpg.

Activate the Actions panel and in the Heritage Photo Actions set click on “Select DECKLE Photos-Multiple” and click the Play button. As usual I get the pop-up instructions telling me how to select and save each photo.

Now let’s take a look at our image. Something is terribly wrong with one of the photos, right? But there’s actually another problem that’s harder to see unless you zoom in to get a closer look.

First let’s look at the obvious problem photo with missing pieces and compare it to the original photo by turning on the visibility of the Background layer.

Here’s the problem: Only one of the sides has a white border. The other three sides don’t have a white border to protect them from the black in the photo being selected and removed by the action. The action uses a Threshold filter that actually increases the amount of black in the photo and background so that’s why so much of the photo was removed.

If we zoom in even closer and add a layer of red below the top “Selected” layer you can see that the edge of the photo on the left looks like a mouse has nibbled on it here and there! So what’s going on?

If we look at the original photo we can see that the black type of the date on the deckle frame is right up against the edge which means when the black background is selected, the black type is also selected and removed from the photo. To make things worse the action expands the selection by 1 pixel to avoid leaving any black along the edge of the frame. So any black even one pixel away from the edge will also be selected and removed.

Now this doesn’t happen very often but I don’t want you to be blind-sided when it does, so if you see this go ahead and select and save the photos that aren’t affected and then you’ll have to use other methods to select the problem photos.

For example, when I used a different action, the one called “Crop & Straighten-WHITE-background,” I got a good selection of the photo that was missing so many pieces. So that worked out just fine and now all I have to do is crop away the one deckle side so it doesn’t look weird.

Notice, though, how most of the deckle edges are gone or partially chopped off. That’s why I don’t normally use this action on photos with deckle frames.

For the other photo with the type problem I started with the original photo and simply painted over the black type with the Brush tool using a fairly hard edge brush. I sampled the color of the deckle frame which is a light gray, made a new layer, zoomed in close, and painted over the type.

When I was satisfied I clicked on the paint layer and pressed Ctrl E (Mac: Cmd E) to Merge Down. Then you can run the “Select DECKLE Photos-Multiple” action again and it’ll work just fine.

So that’s how to trouble shoot when an action isn’t properly selecting the photos!