RGB Gray - Crop

Black Border

A common issue with scanning a negative as you'll notice is that a lot of times you'll have extra space around the image in black. The way to get rid of this is to crop it. Now some of you may like the black border that it has, but it's actually best to manualy add the black border if you like it towards the end of the editing process. That way the black border that has here now won't interfere with your image enhancing process.

Locate Crop Tool

If you browse over to your Tool Palette and find the Crop Tool, go ahead and select it for our next step (C is the shortcut on your keyboard).

Start Crop

Click in one Corner, and then drag across to an opposite corner. Usually from the top left corner to the bottom right works fine.
(Drag from the first corner [1] to the second corner labeled [2] on the image)

Drag Across

After you've dragged across the image to the opposite corner, you should have a dashed line selection as shown here. It doesn't have to be perfectly bumped up to the edge yet, because we can do that in the next step by zooming in.

Match Edges

Now if you zoom in to 100%, and grab the center box, you can pull it over to match up with the edge of the image perfectly. Do this for all four sides, and once you have each edge matched up with the dashed lines, hit the enter/return key to apply the crop.

Zoom Out

Now after making your crop, always zoom out so that you can see how it looks backed by Photoshop's default gray backing. You may see a tiny black strip going around the image. This is standard and should be there, but if you see any sides that seem larger (for example the right side in this image) you can feel free to crop again to get it matched up perfectly.

*Important Note*
If you are having issues getting your crop to match up perfectly when doing this, try going to Window>Snap and turning Snap off. Snap can interfere while trying to make very small adjustments. Remember you can always turn snap back on after the crop if you like having it on.

Check the image one more time zoomed out and make sure you like the results. Remember to again save the image after any major step such as this.
*End Tutorial*