![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
There IS a God!!
I *finally* figured out how to change the resolution on my crappy scanner interface. I love you, VueScan! No, that's a lie. I still hate you. But you're much more useful than you used to be.
A brief history of Layla's scanner: Ever since I switched full-time from my ancient iBook running OS9, to my new-ish eMac running OSX, I've been stuck scanning all my pages on the iBook and using a USB key to transfer the files to the new computer, because my scanner (which, like the iBook, dates back to '98 or '99) doesn't work with OS X. A couple of months ago, Orion picked up an HP Scanjet 5200C at Value Village for about $10 in the hopes that it would work better than my other scanner. Still no OS X drivers, come to find out, but I went looking and found a piece of bug-riddled software called VueScan that claims to support over 400 scanners and scans things from the Scanjet in its slow, creaky, bug-riddled sort of way ... at a consistent 200 DPI. It has an option to increase the magnification, but this drops the DPI correspondingly, so you can end up with, say, a 16-inch-wide image that's only 40 DPI. And sometimes it will just give you a random DPI ... for example, on a test image just now, I set it to 600 DPI and the end result came out at 400, which is still better than 200, but not exactly what I asked for, thanks a lot, VueScan.
But since I'm cleaning today, I moved my old scanner over to the new computer and just for a lark, hooked it up to see if VueScan can see it. And it can! Not only that, but the DPI controls actually seem to work for the old scanner, just not for the HP one. At least, I did get a test image to come out at 600 DPI. VueScan being VueScan, it's possible that I'll scan something tomorrow and get a completely different result. However, I have found a new place in the scanner controls to change the DPI (it has about 15 different places where you can do that) and this one, unlike the rest of them, actually seems to have some effect on the outcome.
This doesn't help much with the old scanner's tendency to scan crooked, but at least I can scan at the right resolution, and without having to walk across the room to do it, even if it's slow as molasses.
Maybe one of these days I'll go down to Office Depot and drop $100 on a new scanner. Or something crazy like that.
A brief history of Layla's scanner: Ever since I switched full-time from my ancient iBook running OS9, to my new-ish eMac running OSX, I've been stuck scanning all my pages on the iBook and using a USB key to transfer the files to the new computer, because my scanner (which, like the iBook, dates back to '98 or '99) doesn't work with OS X. A couple of months ago, Orion picked up an HP Scanjet 5200C at Value Village for about $10 in the hopes that it would work better than my other scanner. Still no OS X drivers, come to find out, but I went looking and found a piece of bug-riddled software called VueScan that claims to support over 400 scanners and scans things from the Scanjet in its slow, creaky, bug-riddled sort of way ... at a consistent 200 DPI. It has an option to increase the magnification, but this drops the DPI correspondingly, so you can end up with, say, a 16-inch-wide image that's only 40 DPI. And sometimes it will just give you a random DPI ... for example, on a test image just now, I set it to 600 DPI and the end result came out at 400, which is still better than 200, but not exactly what I asked for, thanks a lot, VueScan.
But since I'm cleaning today, I moved my old scanner over to the new computer and just for a lark, hooked it up to see if VueScan can see it. And it can! Not only that, but the DPI controls actually seem to work for the old scanner, just not for the HP one. At least, I did get a test image to come out at 600 DPI. VueScan being VueScan, it's possible that I'll scan something tomorrow and get a completely different result. However, I have found a new place in the scanner controls to change the DPI (it has about 15 different places where you can do that) and this one, unlike the rest of them, actually seems to have some effect on the outcome.
This doesn't help much with the old scanner's tendency to scan crooked, but at least I can scan at the right resolution, and without having to walk across the room to do it, even if it's slow as molasses.
Maybe one of these days I'll go down to Office Depot and drop $100 on a new scanner. Or something crazy like that.
OS X is so misunderstood....
This is the year that NeoSquirrel Comics stages a comeback!
Re: OS X is so misunderstood....
Re: OS X is so misunderstood....
no subject
no subject
There's a cool trick for rotating stuff in Photoshop that you may or may not know ... choose the Measure tool (the little ruler) and drag it along one edge of a panel or anything else that you want to straighten up. Then go to Image --> Rotate Canvas --> Arbitrary and just hit OK (it will have the correct value to straighten your picture pre-filled). Saves a lot of time!