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Book ‘scan’ improvement software
March 10, 2007 | 2:08 pm
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By Branko Collin
Atiz, makers of planetary scanners such as the Book Drive, released the beta version of its Snapter software today.
Snapter takes photos of (book) pages and automatically performs a number of clean-up operations on them, such as rotate, de-skew, crop, improve lighting and so on. The software requires that you install Net 2.0 first, which is a free download from Microsoft. For some operation Snapter appears to be using Imagemagick, a command line based image batch processor. The Snapter beta can be downloaded and tried for free.
I toyed a little with the program, but the results so far seemed less than perfect. The problem was partially caused by using wrong source images. Basically Snapter requires you to photograph a subject against a background, probably so that it can guess the shape of the page or book you are trying to ‘scan’.
If you have a flatbed scanner and therefore little need for the functionality of Snapter, you may still require to perform some automatic clean-ups. A free tool called Unpaper may be able to assist you with automatic rotation, de-skewing and removal of noise. Unpaper only works with the PGM and PBM image formats, but batch image processors such as Irfanview and Imagemagick can easily create these for you.
If you only need to clean up a few photos or scans, a generic interactive photo editing tool such as Photoshop or the GIMP may not only be faster, but also provide superior results, in my experience.
Do you clean up your scans? Why, and what tools do you use?
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Comments:
Dear Brian,
Have you had a chance to look at this how to use guide:
http://www.atiz.com/how_to_use_snapter.html
It should help improve your experience with Snapter considerably.
We have tested it quite extensively and hope that it works for most cases when the guideline followed.
If that’s not the case, we still be able to help solve it with your help by forwarding the images that u had problem to us at snapter@atiz.com
We appreciate your thoughts.
Art.
The world badly needs a program that Snapter wants to be but it has to be a batch processing program. Snapter is much too slow. At this time the best workflow components for batch processing document photos are: Clearimage, Picasa, Finereader, and occassionally Irfanview. Unfortunatley, there is no good program for removing black or white borders from color photos.
Try the new release of Snapter.
It is now out of beta. The speed and stability goes up by a notch.
Is there a choice for the format of the output file? Such as tiff or jpg or pdf?