I had an older mac running Tiger and had no issues scanning with my Epson Perfection 1260 scanner and Epson's own spftware. Now using Snow Leopard I am forced to use Image Capture and I cant get the results I want - especially scanning text.
Everything comes out washed out - text is indistinct. Everything looks covereed by a grey mask.
Any ideas?
Thanks
Mark
Thanks Alberto
But I'd like to try and get it working without purchasing anything else. The scanner works with Snow Leopard, but I cant get text scanned satisfactorily
Are you using B/W or Grayscale acquisition?
When I use B/W it is black and white, but never at a clear enough resolution
If I go for greyscale it seems to have this overcast grey tone - smae with colour
Just to give you an idea - here is a scan at 600 dpi Black and white and saved as jpeg
Original is clear black and white
OK I got it.
That image is grayscale. Infact is a JPEG picture. You must select Text, see below
And this is a B/W (1 bit) sample TIFF image
Thanks Alberto for all the help, but here now is my problem!
This is it scanned as text at 300dpi to tiff (it wouldnt let me upload tiff so this is png - same outcome though)
You can act on settings to see if you can get a much darker result.
From the pictures you published it looks like the page you are scanning is very light.
Thats my problem - the page is regular text - clear and easy to see. Changing the settings doesnt make any difference as far as I can see. That 300dpi scan was only 37kb in size - too small i would have thought for a proper scan
revjmark wrote:
That 300dpi scan was only 37kb in size - too small i would have thought for a proper scan
That's the right size for B/W 1bit images, because one bit represents a pixel, on or off.
While grayscale images normally use 8bit per pixel and Color images 24bit per pixel.
Fair enough - but still doesnt explain why the scan is so bad. I just downloaded vuescan as a trial in case it was the scanner that was teh problem. It scans perfecectly fine in vuescan. Must be something wrong with Image Capture.
Unfortunately I don't know what to add.
My sample was aquired with the same software as yours "Image Capture" and default option, almost with the same scanner, but the result was much defined in my case.
Also consider that the original was printed on very thick paper, it's the book's cover.
Many thanks Alberto - I appreciate your help and expertise. I cant figure out what the problem is, but it looks like something to do with Image Capture. I'm going to leave it for tonight.
Thanks again
God bless
Mark
revjmark wrote:
This is it scanned as text at 300dpi to tiff
You need to adjust settings and corrections according to your needs. This doc
<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4505>
explains how (look under "Advanced scanning options"). There will also be additional options specific to your scanner (probably fairly similar to the choices you got with Epson's scanning software). You need to manipulate them until you get what you want.
Btw, if you plan to view on-screen or print, 300dpi is adequate. However, if you plan to run it through OCR it is not, especially not if the text is set in a classical typeface with fine serifs, as yours is; use 600dpi for OCR.
here is an image capture c# scanner you might wanna give it a try. it gives you a high quality picture and the exact greyscale you need.
Scaner & Image Capture issues
