Scanning Made Easy In Windows 7/vista

Transcript

S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 Page 35 S 068 / 1 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista Scan Documents and Pictures the Simple Way Using Built-in Scanning Software Scanning should be a straightforward business: it’s the simple job of ‘photographing’ a paper document and saving it as a picture file on your computer. Unfortunately, it’s often made unnecessarily complicated by the baffling range of options offered by your scanner’s software . In this article, I’ll show you how to use software built into Windows 7 and Vista to scan documents in a much easier way, and take you through the process in simple steps. Windows 7/Vista By Sheila Reeves Use Your PC to Organise Your Paper Documents!.......................................................... S 068 / 2 Step-by-step: Simple Scanning into Windows Paint...................................................................... S 068 / 4 Take Control of Your Scan Quality by Choosing Custom Settings .................................................. S 068 / 11 How to Scan Directly into Other Programs ........ S 068 / 14 This article shows you how to: ... Use built-in Windows software for easy scanning ... Customise your scan settings for betterquality scans ... Scan pictures into Paint and other photoediting programs PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 35 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 Page 36 S 068 / 2 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista Use Your PC to Organise Your Paper Documents! There are benefits to storing paper documents on your PC A scanner photographs documents to be stored as picture files Although we’re all now living in the computer age, it’s amazing how much information we still receive on paper. There are letters, bills and bank statements; clippings we keep from newspapers and magazines; photographs taken on an ordinary film camera; and an awful lot more. Some of this obviously does need to be kept on paper, but there’s quite a lot more that doesn’t. Moving some of these documents to your computer instead brings a couple of useful benefits: ■ Unlike paper documents, a document stored on your PC retains the same quality forever: you don’t have to worry about it fading or disintegrating. ■ Your PC is much easier to keep organised than a mountain of paperwork. By creating suitablynamed folders on your computer, putting everything into the most appropriate folder, and giving everything a descriptive name, it should always be easy to find the document you’re looking for. Getting paper documents into your PC requires a device called a scanner. This is the computer’s equivalent of a photocopier and it works in much the same way, by photographing a document. However, rather than printing the result on to paper as a normal photocopier does, the scanner sends a picture of the document into your PC. From there, it can be saved as a picture file, edited, printed and – of course – opened for viewing whenever you like. You can see a picture of a typical scanner on the opposite page. It’s roughly the same size as a tabloid newspaper, with a hinged lid covering a 36 PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 Page 37 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista S 068 / 3 glass plate.To scan a document or photograph, you place it face-down on the plate, lower the hinged lid, and then either press a button on the scanner itself or run some software on your PC which starts the process of scanning. It’s here that the problems start! Scanners come with their own software, and that software starts up when you begin the scanning process, presenting you with options about how the scan is performed, where and how it’s stored and – perhaps – quite a lot more besides. The software varies from one make and model of scanner to another, and sometimes it’s fairly easy to understand and use, but more often it seems to make a supposedlysimple process unnecessarily complex! Scanners come with their own – often confusing – software Fortunately, Windows 7 and Vista include everything you need to scan paper documents into your PC in a straightforward way. In the next topic, I’ll take you through the steps needed to scan something into Windows’ built-in Paint program and save it to your PC. Later in this article, I’ll explain how to scan into other (probably more capable) picture-editing programs, which is only slightly more complicated, and gives you the benefit of being able to edit your scan using a program you’re more familiar with before saving it. Windows 7 and Vista include a much simpler program PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 37 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 S 068 / 4 Page 38 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista Step-by-step: Simple Scanning into Windows Paint You can easily scan into the Windows Paint program As I mentioned above, we’ll use the Paint program included with Windows to handle the job of scanning. Although Paint certainly isn’t the most flexible of picture-editing programs, we won’t be using it for its editing abilities: all we need to do is receive a picture from your scanner and save it to your PC, and that’s very easy to do in Paint. Before you go any further, make sure your scanner is connected to your computer, plugged into the mains and – if necessary – switched on. (Many scanners don’t actually have an on/off switch; they just ‘sleep’ until they’re called into action. However, if you have a combined printer/scanner which does have an on/off switch, make sure it’s switched on.) Make sure the glass plate is free of dust and fingerprints, because these will be picked up during the scan and spoil the picture. You can clean the plate with any non-abrasive polish or window cleaner and a soft cloth. Place the document into your scanner Next, place the document or picture you want to scan face-downwards on the scanner’s glass plate. It’s important to position the document square on the plate (otherwise you’ll end up with a crooked picture of it!), so ideally place it in one corner of the plate. Lower the hinged lid, taking care not to move the document you’ve just positioned so carefully! Now we’re ready to scan the document, so follow these steps: 1. Open the Start menu, go to All Programs > Accessories and click Paint to start the Windows Paint program. 38 PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 Page 39 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista S 068 / 5 2. The Paint program may open in a comparatively tiny window. That doesn’t really matter too much for our purposes, but you may like to make it larger by dragging its bottom right corner downwards and to the right, or maximise it to fill your screen by clicking the middle button of the group of three in its top right corner. 3. Now follow the appropriate step for your version of Windows: ■ Windows 7: at the far left of the Ribbon, click the blue button indicated in the following screenshot. On the panel that appears, click From scanner or camera. Click this button in Windows 7 Click From scanner or camera ■ Windows Vista: open the File menu and choose From Scanner or Camera. 4. Now you’ll see the window pictured in the next screenshot: this is Windows’ scanning program, and you can probably tell straight away that it isn’t going be rocket science to use it! PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 39 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 Page 40 S 068 / 6 Select the type of result you want Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista 5. The first thing to do is specify what type of document you’re scanning, choosing from these options: ■ Color picture: choose this option if you’re scanning any type of coloured document – a photograph, a picture from a magazine, or a whole magazine page – and you want to receive a colour copy of it. ■ Grayscale picture: select this option if you’re scanning a black-and-white photo (or if you’re scanning a coloured photo or document but you only need a black-and-white copy of it). ■ Black and white picture or text: choose this option if you’re scanning ordinary text (such as a newspaper page) or a simple line drawing. For now we’ll ignore the last option, Custom Settings, and I’ll explain how that works later in this article. Just pick the most appropriate of the three other settings. Don’t agonise too long over it, though, as you can try a different setting a little later. Select the type of document you’re scanning Click Preview 6. Click the Preview button at the bottom of the window. 40 PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 Page 41 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista S 068 / 7 7. At this point there’ll be a pause for a few seconds while your scanner warms up and photographs the document you inserted. After a short time, the preview section at the right of the window will display a small version of the document you’re scanning (which, in my example, is a colour photograph), as shown in the next screenshot. At this point, if you’re not sure that you’ve chosen the right option for your scan, you can go back to step 5 and pick a different option, then click Preview again. A preview of your document or photograph appears here 8. As soon as this preview appears in the window, the program tries to determine where your document is placed on the scanner’s glass plate, and draws a dotted rectangle around it with a square blob in each corner. These dotted lines mark out the area of your document that will be kept when you complete the scan. 9. In my example, the program hasn’t got it quite right. At the bottom of the photo there’s a ratherpale patch of grass which hasn’t been included within that dotted rectangle. Fortunately, you PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 Check whether the outlined area is correct 41 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 S 068 / 8 Page 42 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista don’t have to put up with the program’s suggestion about what area is to be scanned: if you move the mouse on to one of the dotted borders, the pointer shape will turn into a double-headed arrow, and you can then drag that line upwards or downwards (or left and right for the vertical borders) to adjust the size of the dotted rectangle. You can drag the dotted borders to change the size of the box Rather than scanning the entire document, perhaps you only need a portion of it – perhaps a picture or a few paragraphs of text from a magazine page. If so, you use this dotted rectangle to specify the area you want. Move the mouse somewhere inside the rectangle, and you can click-and-drag the rectangle until its top left corner is positioned at the top left corner of the area you want to scan, then drag the square blob in the bottom right corner of the box to adjust its size until the box outlines the section of the page you want to scan. 10. When you’re happy with the area of the document that has been marked out for scanning, click the Scan button at the bottom of the window. The scan is generated ... 42 11. At this point the window we’ve been using will disappear and you’ll be returned to the Paint window. Your scanner is now busily scanning the document, and if you look at the bottom of the Paint window you’ll see a progress bar PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 Page 43 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista S 068 / 9 indicating how far the scanner has got in sending the picture into Paint. 12. When the process completes, you’ll see your scan appear in the Paint window. The picture may be considerably larger than the Paint window itself (even if you maximised the window to fill your screen) but don’t worry about that: it’s all down to the resolution of scans, something we’ll return to a little later in this article. ... and arrives in the Paint window Now that you’re seeing the scan at full size, you might feel that it’s not as good as it should be: perhaps you didn’t quite mark out the right area of it to be scanned, or you chose a colour scan and now wish you picked greyscale. If so, just go back to step 3 and repeat the process. After the scan completes, Paint will ask if you want to save the changes to ‘Untitled’ (by which it means your previous, unwanted scan), so click Don’t Save. 13. With the scan successfully completed, the last thing to do is to save the result as a picture file on your computer. Here things differ depending on which version of Windows you’re using. If you use Windows 7, click the blue button at the far left of the Ribbon as you did before, move the mouse down to Save As, and on the right you’ll see a choice of five options, shown in the next screenshot. If you use Windows Vista, choose File > Save As, and then open the Save as type box at the bottom of the dialog that appears and you’ll find eight options to choose from. PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 43 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 Page 44 S 068 / 10 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista In Windows 7, click this button Move the mouse down to Save As Select one of the first three options Choose a suitable picture format for saving 44 14. Now choose which picture format to use to save the scan.We can ignore most of the options and choose between just three: ■ PNG picture (Windows 7) or PNG (Windows Vista): this is generally the best choice, as it compresses your picture file to take up less storage space while retaining all its quality. However, this isn’t quite such a widely-used picture format as the second option, JPEG. ■ JPEG picture (Windows 7) or JPEG (Windows Vista): this option also produces a small file, but loses a little of the picture’s quality. This format is used universally for pictures, so it’s a good choice if you want to send your scanned picture to someone else and be sure they’ll be able to view it, or if you want to ensure that the picture can be opened by the greatest-possible number of programs. ■ Bitmap picture (Windows 7) or 24-bit Bitmap (Windows Vista): this is another universal standard, like JPEG. However, your picture isn’t compressed at all, which retains its high quality but generates a huge file. Unless you want to PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 Page 45 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista S 068 / 11 open this picture in another program to edit it (and then save it as PNG or JPEG afterwards), this option is best avoided. 15. Select the format you’d like to use by clicking it. (At this point, if you use Windows 7, a Save As dialog will appear, identical to the one Vista users are already seeing). Enter a suitable name for the new picture file in the File name box, choose where to save it, and click Save. Choose a name and location for the file 16. That’s it – you’ve successfully scanned and saved your document! If there’s another you want to scan, pop it on to your scanner’s plate, go back to step 3 and follow the same steps again. Take Control of Your Scan Quality by Choosing Custom Settings The Windows 7/Vista scanning program we were using over the last few pages is deliberately simple. With only three options to choose from – colour, greyscale and black-and-white – you won’t go far wrong, and one of them should produce a suitable scan. However, there may be times when you’d like a little more control over the settings, perhaps to produce a higher-quality scan that’s suitable for printing, or a lower-quality scan to produce a smaller file. On these occasions, you can use the fourth option that we skipped past earlier, Custom Settings. Here’s how to use that option: If necessary, you can adjust the scan settings 1. When you reach step 5 in the previous set of steps, click the Custom Settings option and then click the blue words Adjust the quality of the scanned picture. PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 45 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 S 068 / 12 Page 46 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista Select this option Click this blue link 2. Now you’ll see the dialog pictured in the next screenshot which allows you to tweak the quality of the scan. Choose the required resolution and set the correct picture type Enter the resolution you want to use for your scan 3. The main reason for using these custom settings is to change the resolution (which I’ll explain in a moment). You can enter a new resolution in the box either by typing a different number to replace the figure shown or by using the tiny up/down buttons. In the box labelled ‘Picture type’, choose the type of scan you want to create: these correspond to the same three colour/quality options we chose from earlier. The two sliders in this dialog allow you to adjust the brightness and contrast of the scan, but they can generally be ignored. If you complete your scan and find that it’s obviously too dark, too bright, or lacking in contrast, you might start the scanning process again, return to this dialog and tweak these settings to produce a better result. Alternatively, though, you could open the resulting picture file in a photo-editing program to improve its colour. Select the type of picture you want Click OK 46 PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 Page 47 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista S 068 / 13 4. Click OK to keep these settings and return to the main scanning window. From here, you click the Preview button and continue with the same scanning steps as before. Tips to help you choose the resolution to use The word ‘resolution’ refers to the number of individual tiny dots used to make up a picture. In general, the higher the resolution, the greater the quality, because more detail can be captured if more individually-coloured dots are used to create the picture. However, this is a topic that quickly gets confusing. There are really only two uses for a scanned picture (or a picture taken by a digital camera, for that matter): viewing it on the screen, and printing it on paper. This means that along with your scanner there’s the resolution of your screen to consider, and/or the resolution of your printer. The screen is a lower-resolution device (comparatively few dots), and the printer has a much higher resolution (more dots). Resolution can be a complicated subject! In general, then, if you scan at a fairly low resolution, it should be quite readable on your screen, but it would look absolutely tiny if printed on paper (or, if you tried to print it at a large size, very jagged and blurry). If you were aiming to print it legibly, you’d have to scan at a higher resolution, which would make it appear much larger on your screen – perhaps a good deal larger than your screen itself, requiring you to scroll around to see different areas of the picture. Low resolutions are best, unless you need to print the result in good quality Rather than getting bogged down in complex arithmetic, let’s just run through a few quick tips to help you pick a suitable resolution for your scan: PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 47 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 Page 48 S 068 / 14 For printing, it’s helpful to know your printer’s resolution A low resolution is fine for viewing only on the screen Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista ■ If you’re scanning something with the primary intention of printing it on paper, it’s useful to know the resolution of your printer. This is a figure measured in ‘DPI’ (dots per inch) and it will be noted in your printer’s manual or perhaps even on the printer itself. Armed with this information, set the scanning resolution to roughly half your printer’s resolution. (For example, if your printer’s resolution were 1200 DPI, you’d scan at 600 DPI.) ■ If you’re scanning a black-and-white line drawing which you intend to print (perhaps after a little editing), set the scanning resolution to match your printer’s resolution. ■ If you’re scanning something which you’ll only ever view on screen, a low resolution of around 75 DPI should be enough for a page of text, but a resolution of 150 DPI is better for photographs to make them appear at a reasonable size on your screen. If you do a lot of scanning – or you expect to – it’s a good idea to make a few notes about your results. For instance, if you scan an A4-sized letter at 75 DPI with the picture type set to ‘Grayscale picture’, and you’re happy with the way it looks on your screen, noting those settings down will make it easier to scan your next A4 letter (and will probably work just as well for similar paper documents too). How to Scan Directly into Other Programs Over the preceding pages we’ve looked at how to scan a document or picture into the Windows Paint program, and that’s a perfectly-reasonable way to do it every time. You’ll end up with the scan stored as a picture file on your computer, and you can do whatever you like with it from there: print it, open 48 PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 Page 49 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista S 068 / 15 and edit it in a more flexible program than Paint, send it to someone by email , or include it in another document you’re creating. However, you don’t necessarily have to use Paint to initiate the scanning process. Many other programs allow you to start a scan, but still let you use the friendly Windows scanning program we’ve been working with. For example, you might want to scan a photograph straight into your favourite photoediting software to save the intermediate steps of saving it in Paint, then finding and opening it in your other program. Similarly you might have a genealogy program that allows you to import family documents and photos straight from your scanner. Various programs can initiate and receive a scanned document Unfortunately, I can’t be quite as specific about how to do this from other programs, because each program’s maker can decide where it puts the scanning options and what it calls them. However, I can give you a few clues that should help you find them if they exist. Programs often use different names for scanning options! The first place to look for the scanning-related options is on the program’s File menu. Failing that, they may appear on a menu named Insert or Import. If you’re using a modern program, particularly one made by Microsoft, you’ll probably find a From scanner or camera option, just as you did in Paint. In many other programs, though, you’ll be looking for two other options grouped together on a menu: ■ Select Source: this may be termed ‘Select Device’ or ‘Select TWAIN Source’ or something similar (‘TWAIN’ being the name of the technology that makes the whole scanning business work). ■ Acquire: this may be worded ‘Get Image’ or ‘Scan Picture’. PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10 49 S068.qxd 28/5/10 14:27 S 068 / 16 First tell the program which scanning program to use Page 50 Scanning Made Easy in Windows 7/Vista Begin by choosing the Select Source item, which is used to tell your program which scanner it should use for the scan.You’ll then see a dialog somewhat similar to the one pictured in the next screenshot. (It probably won’t be identical, because every program is different.) This dialog may well list two ‘scanners’ even though you only have one connected to your PC. What you’re actually seeing is the list of available scanning software: the software that came with your scanner itself, and the software built into Windows 7/Vista. To use the familiar Windows scanning program, choose the item whose name begins with the letters ‘WIA’. Choose the device whose name begins ‘WIA’ Choose the Acquire option to begin scanning 50 Now you’ve told your program which program it should start whenever you want to scan something. The next step is to choose the Acquire option (or its equivalent in the program you’re using), and your program will start Windows’ scanning program. From here, everything happens in exactly the way it did before. When you click the Scan button after choosing your scan settings, the scanned picture will arrive in the program you’re using, which will either display it for editing and saving, or include it in the document or project you’re working on (once again, of course, it depends upon the type of program you’re using). PC Knowledge for Seniors Update 5 July/August 10