News and Reviews > Mini-Reviews by Members

Review/Tips: "Scanning - VueScan and Associates" Pt.I: Intro & Bookscanning

<< < (6/10) > >>

J-Mac:
Brahman,

When you say "film" do you mean the negatives? I don’t have these. Most are old - very old - photos from various extended family members that I have borrowed for scanning. Most are from early 20th century but many are from the 19th century (1800's). None came with the negatives. I have no choice but to scan the photo prints I have.

Sounding like I might have to stick with my Canons after all unfortunately.

Thanks!

Jim

brahman:
Hi Jim,

yes I meant negatives, but whatever I said on the Multi crop/Auto crop issue also applies to scanning the prints.

Simpy put several photos on the glass (keep 1/2 inch distance between them) and VueScan detects them with the multicrop setting. If more fit on the glass in rotated positions you can do that too and tell VueScan in the Batch settings to f.e. scan frame 1 landscape, frame 2 rotate to the left, frame 3 landscape again, etc. There are many more options.
http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/html/vuesc28.htm#inputbatchscan

Also read Ed's batch scanning tips for general speed up on big jobs:
http://www.hamrick.com/bat.html

Finally, a special tip from me:
If most of the photos are the same size, you may want to try out sorting them by size, then only put one print at a time on the glass flush in the glass' corner, tell VueScan to scan only this exact size in crop options so that the carriage only moves as far as the exact photo size goes and turn Multi crop OFF (Input>Auto repeat will then appear and Batch scan will disappear).
 
If done right you may keep the scanner lid open. Set Input>Auto repeat on a comfortable interval time (but if you can replace the print with a new one in the time the carriage moves back, you can even use "continuous").

This can save you a lot of time with processing and scanning. It may sound counter intuitive to do single scans, but may be faster, since the software needs no processing time, you can quickly change the photos, easily use the corner guides on the scanner to put the photo in the same position and possibly scan with an open lid. Try it out. Use my tip in the review to keep the scanner positioned low to avoid sore shoulders. Raw scanning as mentioned in my previous post can also be used.

Nod5:
Hi again brahman,
Right, I really only had OCR for keyword searches in mind but didn't make that clear. I haven't even tried using tesseract to make accurate standalone plaintext versions of scanned documents (I very seldom need that). But if/when I do I'll keep the Abby advice in mind.

I haven't tried ScanKromsator either. I went with ST since it seemed more geared for speed when processing batches of pages. I think its output (and similarly for SK from what I've read) is really, really impressive. I was blown away when I first tried ST in combination with djvulibre! The final output was very close in quality to pdfs made directly from a text file. This is one area where software and hardware seems to develop very fast now. In a world where hundreds of millions of people will over the coming years likely buy an ebook reading device/pad/thingy I guess things will just speed up even more.

brahman:
Yes, I agree, DjVu is the way to go. I wish it would be supported more ...

But maybe its time has come now!

J-Mac:
Brahman,

Thanks again for the tips and hints. I don’t know that sorting them by the same size is doable. There are a lot of different sizes and some family members have given me prints that look as if someone may have trimmed them to fit somewhere at some time. Plus I am trying to keep them together by family/generation because I have to store them that way so I can easily return them after scanning. In case you haven't guessed I have become the unofficial family history researcher and family tree keeper for the family!

But I will surely try all that you suggest. I never suspected that such a scanning software - independent of that which comes with the hardware - even existed! I'll download the trial and if it makes my scanning project even a little more efficient than what I am presently doing then I will surely purchase the Pro version.

Thank you.

Jim

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page