Vuescan - a little help required

[wlaidlaw]

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I am scanning in some old family documents about the building of my great grandfather's factory in the north of Scotland for The Scottish Industrial Heritage. Normally I would use Acrobat Professional but the version 7 I had, no longer works in Mac Lion. My daughter is getting me an educational copy of Acrobat 10 Pro but that will be some time. I am therefore using Vuescan to make the required PDF documents. Ed, as usual, is quick off the mark with a Lion compliant update and together with a Lion update plug in from Canon UK, all is working OK with the Canon LIDE 600F scanner I have in France.

 

However when I used to use Acrobat, this used Canon's own TWAIN driver. On the advanced tab, this has a very useful feature called "Backlight Correction". When I am scanning old documents, often hand written on both sides on quite thin paper, this enabled me to make the background lighter. This much reduced the "print through" of writing on the back side of the document. Knowing how flexible Vuescan is, I would have thought there was a similar feature but I cannot locate it. Any more experienced Vuescan users know how I might adjust the scan to reduce the print through from the backside of the document?

 

Wilson

[stunsworth]

Wilson, I've no idea I'm afraid, but have you thought of sending an email to Ed Hamrick outlining what you want? He's usually pretty responsive.

[delander †]

 

However when I used to use Acrobat, this used Canon's own TWAIN driver. On the advanced tab, this has a very useful feature called "Backlight Correction". When I am scanning old documents, often hand written on both sides on quite thin paper, this enabled me to make the background lighter. This much reduced the "print through" of writing on the back side of the document. Knowing how flexible Vuescan is, I would have thought there was a similar feature but I cannot locate it. Any more experienced Vuescan users know how I might adjust the scan to reduce the print through from the backside of the document?

 

Wilson

 

I may have misunderstood but cant you make the background lighter in photoshop or similar. Can you do anything by placing a sheet of white paper behind the material to be scanned.

 

Jeff

[wlaidlaw]

Steve,

 

As per your suggestion, I have emailed Ed. I have done once this in the past and got a somewhat grumpy and not very helpful answer but I may have got him on a bad day. We will see,

 

Jeff,

 

The problem is that the writing on the reverse of the thin pages I am scanning, shows through on the facing page scan. A white backing sheet would not help, as the scanner has already a dead white scanner backing. I have tried playing around with the scans in Photoshop but firstly this was not very effective and secondly it makes it a 4 stage process. If I can correct at the scanning stage, I can scan these documents straight to a multipage PDF, rather than scan to JPEG, correct in PS, convert to PDF and finally assemble as a multipage PDF. As I have quite a few docs to do, this is a lot of extra work. The end result is nothing like as good as changing the Backlight Correction on the Canoscan software. If Ed has no quick cure for me, I will just wait for my daughter to come with Acrobat X Pro for me. The docs have been waiting 115 years to be scanned - they are not going anywhere.

 

Thanks for suggestions guys.

 

Wilson

[DavidStone]

Easy. Back it with black paper.

 

David

[pop]

Easy. Back it with black paper.

 

David

 

I second that. Place a sheet of matte black paper behind the page to be scanned.

 

Actually, I find it a bit of an embarrassment that most flatbed scanners come with a white lid.

[wlaidlaw]

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Thanks guys - exactly what Ed suggested. He was intrigued however by the backlight correction slider on the Canon software and says he has no idea how they have got that to work in software but they have. I have a large sheet of dead black art paper, which will work perfectly.

 

Wilson