[photo-3d] Re: My new scanner & photoshop Question

["John Goodman" <jgood@xxxxxxxx>]

> What is the fastest way to remove this blank area in
> photoshop. 

I'm not a Photoshop expert, so there may well be an easier, 
more direct method, but here's what I'd do. Since I assume the 
goal is to have the left and right images right next to each 
other, I'd first make a blank "template" file for your scanned 
chip size. This would be sized to just fit inside the windows at 
the dpi you scan at. You can use the marquee tool (rectangular 
selection tool) and select inside one of your scanned windows, 
press ctrl-c, then press ctrl-n to make a new file and Photoshop 
will make it the size of the selection outline. Of course you can 
also create new files of any arbitrary size. Once you have a 
standard chip window-size file, make a second "template" file 
that's twice as wide to accommodate the two chips.  

To do the stereo assembly job, you have both template files 
open (at small zooms if workspace is a problem) and your 
single image scanned pair. When the chip size template has 
focus, ctrl-a selects the whole thing. Make sure that the cursor 
in the template file looks like a little box below the arrow (press 
"m" for marquee if it doesn't). Now, this selection outline can 
just be dragged onto your scanned image, and positioned 
accurately over one of your chips, with the arrow keys giving 
you single pixel positioning control. In case you need to zoom 
in or out, you can always use the spacebar+alt or 
spacebar+ctrl shortcut keys to bring up the magnifier and click 
on the parts of the image you want to zoom in or out of.

Once your selection outline is positioned where you want in the 
scanned image, press ctrl-c to copy, change window focus to 
the second (2X wide) template and press ctrl-v to paste. Press 
"v" (to select the Move tool if need be) and then this pasted 
image can be positioned as desired, again just by using the 
keyboard. Pressing Shift when using the arrow keys increases 
the moving speed.

Do the same drag selection outline, position selection outline, 
copy and paste for the other chip, and you should have a nicely 
cropped pair in frame that's twice as wide as it is high. 
Although the layers can be linked together for movement and 
size transformation, color or filter manipulation only seems to 
work on individual layers. Thus, you will have to merge the two 
layers or flatten the image before doing these adjustments, via 
the layers palette menu (click the triangle that's right under the 
pallet close box "X" in the upper right corner).

While the above is just a few steps, it could be tedious if you 
large numbers to process. Perhaps it could be automated with 
an action sequence? Keyboard shortcuts save a bit of time, 
however. Hope this helps.

John Goodman