WARNING! THIS IS FOR PHOTOSHOP USERS ALREADY FAMILIAR WITH THE BASICS OF PHOTOSHOP. IF YOU ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH PHOTOSHOP THIS WILL PROBABLY LEAVE YOU SCRATCHING YOUR HEAD.

But seeing how complex PhotoShop can be, it may still leave experienced users pounding their heads!

But, for what it's worth...

When using PhotoShop (or PhotoShop Elements) it has always been a hassle when it came to circle cropping. I just don't understand why the product, which is THE premiere grahpics and photo editing tool, does not have a sizable, circle cropping tool or circle marquee (selection tool).

Such a tool is a necessity when it comes to adding images to ChipGuide, creating better scans for posting here, on eBay and inserting into one's collection database (Collector's Assistant, etc.)

In the past, I have used PhotoShop's circle marquee (selection) tool to circle crop, but in doing so, it is fraught with many steps and a difficult, eyeballing adjustment to size the circle to the outer circumference of the desired chip. For those who use PhotoShop, they probably use this technique, which is: Place the circle marquee tool cursor at a point that is 45 degrees left of the top of the chip and 1/2 the radius away from the outer edge of the chip. Then, 'click' and hold the left mouse button, hold down the shift key (this keeps the marquee (selection area) round) and drag the cursor to the same point on the opposite side of the chip If done right, the selection area is the same as the diameter of the chip. But using this eyeball approach, you are often off a bit and either repeat the process, or try to move the resulting selection area over the chip, hoping the size was correct, and it was just off center.

While it would be nice to just click "crop" at this point, in PhotoShop it will still leave the background color of your scanner's lid or paper if you covered the chip for better contrast, around the chip. This is another short coming of PhotoShop, and the work around is to (while the round marquee is still present) select "SELECT" from the menu bar and select "Inverse". This reverses the contents of the selection marquee. Instead of containing the chip image, what is now selected is everything in the image, except the chip. Then click "EDIT" (on Menu Bar) and select "Clear". This works like a cropping tool, and also clears any color around the edge of the chip. At this point, adjust the size of the image and Save it.

So, this is the Made Easier part of this post...

To pinpoint the correct, and repeatable spot to place the circle selection marquee cursor (remember: the upper left area, outside the edge of the chip) just start off with the square/rectangular marquee selection tool. Size the square tool for the outer edges of the chip. Leave the dotted line image of the selected area and switch to the round marquee. Plavce the cursor of the round marquee at the upper left corner of the square selection area (still visable) and start the left click, shift key and drag the cursor to the lower right. This will make the circle selection marquee the exact size of the chip!

While you will still want to repeat the Inverse and Clear steps above to get the "chip only" in the image, there are a few other tricks available with PhotoShop to make production of a lot of chip-only scans easier.

For example, instead of using the Inverse and Clear steps, just copy the image (control + c) that is contained in the circle marquee and create a new file. use the default image size or adjust it when asked and then paste (control + v) the imgae into the new file. The only thing you will see is the chip and the background will be white! Do a Save As and you have your circle cropped image!

If you scanned more than one chip (providing the edges don't touch) then go back to the scan and while in the marque mode, you can actually move the circle from the first chip to the next chip and repeat this process to create new images for each chip and do this for every chip in the scan (as long as they are all the same size).

And if you have multiple scans, all done at the same time, you can do one sheet and then drag that same marquee selection circle to the next image, do all those chips and then go to another image, for as many images that you have!

Enjoy!