Straightening rotated rectangles

[scottie]

Does anyone know of an action or script or magic that will automaticly straighten rotated rectangles. A client gave me a CD with 97 digital photos of a xmas party. She wants 2 posters 24 X 36" With the photos spread out over two posters. So, I suggested laying them down as if thrown on a table with random rotations. She agreed.....NOW she's desided that they should not be rotated. She wants them squared to the poster edges. I had a plugin that would make two lines perpendicular but that doesn't seem relevent here. Any idea's? I'm not looking forward to manually straightening them or deleting and importing them again.
Thanks

[AdobeAce]

Hi Scotti,

Usually when you don't get an answer for a few days it means there really isn't a good answer or ANY answer to the question. I'm afraid this is one of those cases.

Rotating (lots Transforming of ojects in general) in Illustrator is one of the quirks of the program. Whether you use the Rotate tool, a palette or a menu command, the angle "always" goes back to 0° after the object's transformation has been completed.

I guess this makes sense in that Illustrator is a drawing & design program, not a layout program. It's far more likely in this kind of an application that various objects rotated at two or more angles will need to be selected together and rotated as a unit to another angle (maybe to create a pattern). Reseting to 0° makes the process simpler in that you won't get __° in your palettes when you select objects of various angles at the same time.

But there's is a good reason I put quotes around the word "always" when saying the rotation goes back to 0°. It's ONLY true if you're not doing the Rotation as an Effect. As an Effect (Effect menu > Distort & Transform Transform...), the rotation is totally flexible, so I can select an object at any time and alter the Rotation in the Appearance palette by double-clicking on the Effect listing or Trashing the Effect entirely.

Whenever working on a project (no matter what application), I always try to make my work as flexible as possible. Why? Murphy's Law! When dealing with non-artists or clients, change is the only constant so it's almost inevitable that Murphy Law is just lurking behind every object you Rotate, Shear, Scale and more.

In Illustrator, Effects are you're strongest deterent to being ticketed by Murphy's Law.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help with the problem at hand.

Happy Holidays!

Ace

[scottie]

I found a plugin called Square Up. It will rotate a drawn rotated rectangle back to a 0º x 90º rotion. For some reason it will not rerotate pics, probabley because they don't have real anchor points. Now, in PS you can batch rotate pics using the auto menu. What does PS see in a pic file that AI doesn't? Hmmmmmmm. BTW, Square Up does much more and is worth the shareware fee.

[AdobeAce]

Hi Scottie,

Sounds like a great plugin. Where did you find it?

Ace

[phenn]

Hi Scottie,

Sounds like a great plugin. Where did you find it?

Ace

I found more information here (http://www.pluginsworld.com/plugin.php?directory=adobe&software=illustrator&plugin=164&plug=square-up).

[AdobeAce]

Thanks phenn!

Ace

[The Repro Kid]

I found a plugin called Square Up. It will rotate a drawn rotated rectangle back to a 0º x 90º rotion. For some reason it will not rerotate pics, probabley because they don't have real anchor points. Now, in PS you can batch rotate pics using the auto menu. What does PS see in a pic file that AI doesn't? Hmmmmmmm. BTW, Square Up does much more and is worth the shareware fee.

Square up is way cool I used to use it, I didn't know a MacOsX version came out.

The reason square up can rotate a rectangle but not a picture is because what square up is actually doing is averaging points and keeping the correct scale. You can do it manually in illustrator, you don't need square up, but it's much easier with square up. With Illustrator you have run around the whole box averaging two points at a time, this results in a slight size change so you have to go back and resize your manually squared up rectangle. At this point in time it's easier to just place a guide on one point, select that point as your rotate origin, rotate and let the other point snap to the guide. I average points when the rectangle is not a simple rectangle but a more complicated rectangular shape like stair steps.

But averaging points won't square a picture, because, as you said, only a rectangle has anchor points, a picture does not.

[scottie]

So, what does Photoshop see in a rectangular picture when it automatically rotates gangs of skewed scanned pictures? Just wondering if I could use the PS script and modify it to make a script or action that would do this for my lazy butt.

BTW, I found another shareware plugin that looks very interesting. It's called Cylinder Distort but on the plugin site noted by Phenn it states that it's shareware. When I went to download it for tryout I found that it's cost is 9$, pay up front. Don't sound like shareware to me? I don't like buying a pig in a pok.

[The Repro Kid]

I wasn't aware photoshop could straighten out skewed pictures.

However, scanning software has been doing this for years. I imagine photoshop is doing the same thing that scanning software does.

And lets not forget, comparing vector operations against pixel operations really is comparing apples with oranges. :(

P.S. You're right, software that requires you to pay up front, without being able to try the software first, is not shareware. I love shareware, this is not cool.