I've scanned thousands of Instax, Polaroid (old and new), etc., and the most painful part of the process is taking the raw scan (which includes a significant border around the print) and cropping/rotating to select only the image, or alternately the outline of the physical print.
There has to be a way to make this less painful.
Here's a scenario of how it could work:
- New crooked scan of Instax photo with lots of border slop
- Enter rotate module
- Proposed horizontal and vertical alignments, based on obvious straight features (edge of photo, edge of image) are discovered and displayed as dotted lines overlaid on image
- Clicking one line will rotate image to match
- Clicking more lines will define crop area
- Should the in/out of the crop area be confused, clicking on the "other side" of the line, or something like that, will flip it
- A slight border is often desirable (to show the edge of the print for example) so a control to tweak the placement of crop relative to the found edge is needed; separate H-V or T-B-L-R with a "link" control would be the fancy way
- You could also add (along with the above) snapping to crop, when near corners, maybe a workflow like: a) click a corner, b) click another corner, c) click a third corner, d) image is now cropped and straightened ... corners could be detected and highlighted, even
- If the scans are reasonably similar, copying "cropping hints" from one image to another should work
I don't think this is a tough ask, and wow would it save me time, along with anyone else who deals with lots of scans of photos and negatives.
The problem with applying the existing Transform module is that it "only" straightens/aligns the image. Often that works well. But it doesn't crop, nor is it something that helps copy a crop from one image to another, so it's pretty much just frustrating instead of useful.
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