03 Crop with care

Now I can crop my photo, but because it’s now on a skew (because I’ve straightened the horizon), I have to be more careful. I have to adjust the crop corners so that they go just to the edges of the image and not beyond – I don’t want any of the black areas of the slide mount to be included.

04 Final adjustments

Once your image is cropped, it’s a lot easier to make meaningful tonal adjustments. In this instance, now that I’ve cropped off the black slide mount, I can see that the image area itself doesn’t have a proper black, so I can drag the Black Point slider to the right to restore it.

05 The finished picture

That’s much better. My scanned photo is now straightened up and I’ve cropped out the black slide mount in the original scan. Incidentally, if you are going to scan in your old transparencies or negatives, use a scanner with Digital ICE or some other dust removal system – otherwise you face hours of tedious manual dust removal!

See also

More Aperture tutorials