CS4 circular crop/marquee

[6163621]

For a library project I need to scan in hundreds of phonographic records (remember the old fashioned vinyl LP).

I need to present the "information on the circle" and ideally do not have the square shape, i.e. just the cut out round bit. I am not a CS4 expert but looking at it it seems that the circular marque tool is the key but I cannot get it to do what I want or what indications through Google are.

I had thought the easiest point would be to put the cursor in the centre of the disk and expand outwards to a circle, snapping to the edge of the label and then I could crop. But the circle just doesn't do that. Could anyone give some advice? Later on if possible could one automate this as an automator workflow as there is always a barrier between the black disk and the label ? even if one can just then select it and then it can automatically save it out ?

Any thoughts for a graphics doozy welcomed. Thank you !

 

[bocomo]

1. use the elliptical marquee tool to select the label area you want (like you have been doing)
2. once you have the area that you want to keep selected, press command-j (on the mac), control-j (on windows) to copy the selected area to a separate layer
3. delete the background layer (original layer)
4. save the new image as a file that supports transparency, like png


to select from the center out, hold option/alt
to make the selection a perfect circle hold shift

 

[6163621]

Thanks. Think this is the problem as no matter where I start I don't get a perfect circle (to match the circle of the scan). All I want to do is fine a way to make the circle scan err circlular and cut off the square stuff that's not needed. But either I am incredibly dumb with this or...

 

[FourCandles]

Thanks. Think this is the problem as no matter where I start I don't get a perfect circle (to match the circle of the scan). All I want to do is fine a way to make the circle scan err circlular and cut off the square stuff that's not needed. But either I am incredibly dumb with this or...

bocomo has described how to make the selection a perfect circle, so I'm confused why it's not working. Just to put it another way in case this helps:

Open your scanned file
Select the Elliptical Marquee tool (M)
Position the cursor over the centre of the hole in middle of the label
Hold down Option and Shift together
Click and drag with the mouse until the circle is the right size.

Then on to #2 in bocomo's post.

 

[RodoLana]

An alternative to the previously described method, that would be fully editable, is to create a vector mask instead of deleting the background layer. Open your scanned image, double click on the background layer to make it a regular layer. Then make the selection as described earlier, now turn the selection into a vector mask. In CS3 I would do this by clicking on the add vector mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel, as CS4 has a new mask panel I'm not sure where it's located in the panel, maybe someone who's using CS4 could tell you where. Using a mask gives you the ability to edit your selection in case it's not centered correctly, it' s too big or too small and such. Since you're looking to automate your process, I would record this as an action and then turn the action into a droplet which you can then take a folder full of images and drag the folder onto the droplet, which would then run the action on all the images within the folder. One caveat to this is, make sure you try this on a duplicate set of images to make sure the action and droplet work correctly, before running them on the actual images.
I hope this helps.

RL

 

[6163621]

Thanks. It seemed to be critical to press shift and then the alt key (on mac) rather than the other way around - or my Apple keyboard is having a barn storm. Thank you. Now with the various help here I got the objective sorted out.

I appreciate the kind assistance. Darren