CS6 Photoshop Autocrop Around Object in Image & Add Margin?

That would not really be an option. I was likely not clear enough in my explanation.

Imagine a antique porcelain vase on a black background. The "margins" I am referring to are the distance between the outer edges of the vase and the edges of the crop. This would be equivalent to the CSS padding.

The psd files act as my master file which I archive.

I batch process groups of psd files through a bulk watermarking app. This app creates a copy of each image which it watermarks, resizes, changes the resolution for web display. It then saves each copy as a jpeg by appending a "-w" to the end of the original file name. The original psd file is not touched. After articles are published the watermarked copies can be deleted as they can be generated at a future date again.

The real time bottleneck is manually placing the crop tool on the outer edges of a object within the image and then adding padding around the object by increasing the canvas size by given size. I've added a action to PS add the padding by increasing the canvas size.

What I really need is a PS plugin to automatically recognize a object in the image and then crop that image after adding a given margin around the object. There is a similar feature in some scanner software whereas it automatically detects the edges of a photo you wish to scan against the white background of the scanner lid. What I am looking for is more difficult in that any software would be trying to detect the borders of a non-rectangle shaped objects on background whose coloring gradually changes due to lighting.

I built a small app in Realbasic (later Real Studio, Xojo) a number of years ago to do something similar. I had a series of small images consisting of black text on a white background. I wanted these images trimmed so as not to include any empty white space below, above, or on the sides of the actual text.

This app scanned the rgb value of each pixel in a image, looking for pixels which were not white. If a non white pixel was found it compared its x and y coordinates within the picture to four properties which stored the x and y coordinates of the highest, lowest, farthest left, and farthest right non white pixel found so far. When the scan was completed the four properties represented the crop frame.

This could be adapted in some situations if I were using a green screen for a background as there would be a high contrast between the background and object; however, I need to use black or gray background. There are also subtle changes in those backgrounds due to lighting.

Thanks for all the input!

Probably stuck with manually moving the crop frame for now; however, this has been speeded up by using either Apple's built-in magnification or Pixie from the developer tools.

Without these apps the only way to correctly place the crop frame would be to open each image at 100% (5,184 pixels wide) and scroll to the top, bottom, left, and right to move the crop frame into position.

With these apps I can open the images in PS at the default 25% on my left screen and open a magnification app on the left edge of my right screen. The magnification app is set to 4x (full size) so this allows me to quickly position the crop frame within PS.

Adapting the previous app I made would take some further work as I'd have to establish two tolerance settings that tell the app what exactly are the rgb pixel ranges for a black or gray background so as not to confuse it with the object on top of the background. Dealing with shadows cast by the object would be a big headache as they are often barely present and would be nearly the same rgb pixel value as the nearby background.

I'll try that. Nice to see their forum is accessible again.

I haven't been using there forum for some time as the last time I attempted to use it Safari gave a error message saying the site was not properly configured. I tried a couple other browsers and that did the same even after logging in. Called Adobe and their answer was to try another browser as opposed to fixing their site coding.