How to resize while centering on an object?

[aleksb]

Hi everybody,
I do apologize if this has been answered already but I couldn't find it. As a newbie, sometimes you don't even know for what exact words to look for...

Anyway, I use PSE 6.0 to process pictures of coins I make with a digital camera. These pics are TIF and very large but that is not the issue. What I need is the following: after cropping the picture to more or less several millimeters around the coin (there is only one coin side on the picture, nothing else!), I change the background color to white and that is all fine. What I would then like to do is to make all picture sizes the same, but seen from the center of the coin itself. Because the primary cropping is never totally precise, the resulting picture differ in size and I am aware that it could be resized but then it is not from the center of the coin but from the center of the picture itself, which does not help.

So, can somebody tell me how to resize a TIF picture from the center of the only object on it? I tried to do it with the magic extractor but first of all sometimes it is greyed out in the menu and cannot be used and after having used it (it finds the coin and selects it ok!) I cannot copy and paste that selection into a new canvas (which I thought would be the simplest way of doing what I need...).

I hope I could explain well what I need to do, THANKS to whoever helps with this!

Sincerely,
Aleks

[ken1]

You need to crop the coins with precision. Suggest that you access the cookie cutter tool, and in the shapes library select the one titled "shapes." There is a circular one.
It will be all black.
In the options bar, under shapes options, select from center
Drag out the circular shape and crop be clicking on the check mark
Note that in the options bar you can also elect to scale the selection. This may be helpful in case the coins are of varying sizes.
Select>all, Edit>copy, Edit>paste to a new background.
It is desirable to have the resolution of the coin selection, and that of the new background ,the same.

[Jeff Perry]

I would set up a target empty new (blnk) image (File>New>Blank File...) with te exact desired finished dimensions and the same resolution (ppi) as the native TIFs. Save it as a blank file for future use.

Open a TIF, grab the circular marquee tool, with the sift key held down drag out the circle around the coin.

Select the move tool, and holding the shift key down, drag and drop the coin onto the blank file in the Photo Bin. The shift key will make it come in centered in the blank file.

Save it as a new file (JPG).

If you have more to do, you can UNDO the move (to clear the file of the coin), open the next TIF, and proceed as before.

One more thing, after you have successfully moved the coin into the center of blank image, if you need to resize it, hold the ALT key down when dragging on the corner "handles" and it will re-scale in all directions simultaniously. That way it is always in the center.

Jeff

[aleksb]

Dear Jeff,
Thanks for this idea, it works a treat! What I do now is nearly an automatic process and the result is precisely what I wanted:

1. Open the original TIF and change the background to white with the bucket tool. That also makes magic extractor accessible.
2. In the magic extractor screen I select the coin only.
3. I make a new blank file of certain (always the same, that was the point!) dimensions and with the same resolution as the original coin pic.
4. I then use move tool with shift to drag and drop to the new file.

Which makes it perfectly centered, which is what I needed.

Thanks a lot, now I have 128 more files to process, but at least I know what I am doing and the result is exactly as wanted.

Great help, THANKS!
Aleks