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Your scanner came with software, but much of the software that comes with consumer scanners is poor. (It's given away. That's your first clue.)
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
Secrets of scanner software, Part 1


April 13, 2003


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard

   Ever wonder how some people get beautiful pictures out of their scanners while you just seem to get frustrated? Wouldn't you love to know the secret of making high-quality scans?
   I'll share them with you this week and next.
   Flatbed scanners are scanners that make digital images out of flat items such as photos; film scanners make digital images out of slides and negatives. Flatbed scanners are sometimes able to scan slides and negatives, but they usually do a poor job. Flatbed scanners can also be used to turn typewritten text into a word processor document, using optical character recognition, or OCR. (That's not part of today's article.)
   Your scanner came with software, but much of the software that comes with consumer scanners is poor. (It's given away. That's your first clue.) Get your own software, learn how it works and get to know it well enough to trust it. Start with a good scanner driver -- VueScan from www.hamrick.com or SilverFast from www.silverfast.com -- and add good image editing software (Photoshop Elements 2.0 from www.adobe.com). You can find Windows and Mac versions of all three.
   You also need a good image viewer. This is the step most people skip, but don't you dare. Get ACDSee Classic for Windows (it's roughly the same as ACDSee 3.1; do NOT get the current bloatware version of ACDSee) or ACDSee 1.6 for the Mac, both from www.acdsystems.com. Go to the "Digital photography and imaging" section of my Web site for articles on why you must have an image viewer and on how to set up ACDSee for proper operation. My site is at technofileonline.
   You can choose three color modes (or "bit plane" settings) when you scan. Which setting is correct is not as obvious as it might seem.
   Choose "color," of course, for all color images. But note that black-and-white prints aren't actually black and white; they're black, white and gray. This means you must set your scanner to "grayscale" when scanning B/W photos. (Don't use the color mode; that just wastes file space.) The third setting, called "black and white" by most scanner programs, is strictly for drawings, black-and-white newspaper pages, hand-written notes and that sort of thing.
   There are two ways to get a digital image from your scanner to your computer.
   The first way is to have the scanner (or the computer) save the picture as a file. You get a preview of the image in the scanner software, then click an icon to tell the scanner to create the scan and save the picture.
   Make sure the scanner saves the image in a non-destructive way. JPEG (also called JPG) is a lossy, or destructive, format; always use a non-destructive image format such as TIF (also called Tiff), PNG or BMP.
   The second way skips the file. Using a procedure called TWAIN, the scanner sends the image into one of your programs, so that it appears on your screen in, say, Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. That way, you can edit the image or crop it and then save it right inside that program. Be sure to avoid JPEG when you save the file.
   I recommend the first method if you have a lot of pictures, slides or negatives to scan. Get them scanned first and edit or crop them later. The second method is fine if you have only a few items to scan, but I prefer the first method. Here's why: I always, without exception, want to have an original scan for safety's sake. I never touch the scan that comes out of the scanner except to copy it. So I let the scanner create a file as the first step, then edit and tweak the copy.
   Next: Software magic after the scan.