Newbie to scanning > Am I on the right track?
Posted: Sat Feb 25, 2012 5:33 pm
Hi,
I'm a newbie to scanning sheet music and have over the last few weeks evolved the following workflow. I'd be grateful if someone "in the know" could comment on this approach or offer some pearls of wisdom! I'm using a PC and Epson V330 flat bed. (but I'm only doing limited numbers of pages not large tomes!). I've downloaded Irfanview and the "Homer" package intended for DIY book scanning (which includes Scan tailor, does OCR and makes PDFs).
I scan in Black and White at 600 DPI and save as TIF files with no compression (they're all about 3500 to 4500 Kb).
First the right hand side pages, then the left. These are sequentially numbered.
I review the images quickly at this stage and redo any that are glaringly misaligned.
Since the left hand pages (pass two) are upside down I've written a script that calls Irfanview's command line function, it applies TIF/Fax4 compression to both right and left hand pages, then in addition it vflips and hflips the left hand pages, saving the converted new files into a subfolder and renumbering them 0 to n.tif with the file names padded to the same length. This sub folder of images are now all in the correct order and orientation. The file size at this stage is around 70-150 Kb.
Scan Tailor is then used to sequentially apply orientation, deskew, content identification, margins and finally to output the final version of the images (tifs again) in a further subfolder.
I drag and drop this directory of third generation images onto the Homer desktop Icon and using option 4 perform OCR to the pages and produces the final (searchable) PDF file.
So that's it so far, I arrived at the initial TIF/No compression (and large files) since I wanted to automate the rotation of the second set of images (left hand pages) with Irfanview, so the same compression algorithm is applied to left and right pages.
A couple of Questions:
As TIF is "Lossless" can I delete the initial none compressed files? I intend keeping the secondary, renumbered, reoriented and compressed Tifs.
Is B&W, 600 DPI, TIF/No compression a sensible (practicable) approach?
I'd welcome your thoughts and comments...
I'm a newbie to scanning sheet music and have over the last few weeks evolved the following workflow. I'd be grateful if someone "in the know" could comment on this approach or offer some pearls of wisdom! I'm using a PC and Epson V330 flat bed. (but I'm only doing limited numbers of pages not large tomes!). I've downloaded Irfanview and the "Homer" package intended for DIY book scanning (which includes Scan tailor, does OCR and makes PDFs).
I scan in Black and White at 600 DPI and save as TIF files with no compression (they're all about 3500 to 4500 Kb).
First the right hand side pages, then the left. These are sequentially numbered.
I review the images quickly at this stage and redo any that are glaringly misaligned.
Since the left hand pages (pass two) are upside down I've written a script that calls Irfanview's command line function, it applies TIF/Fax4 compression to both right and left hand pages, then in addition it vflips and hflips the left hand pages, saving the converted new files into a subfolder and renumbering them 0 to n.tif with the file names padded to the same length. This sub folder of images are now all in the correct order and orientation. The file size at this stage is around 70-150 Kb.
Scan Tailor is then used to sequentially apply orientation, deskew, content identification, margins and finally to output the final version of the images (tifs again) in a further subfolder.
I drag and drop this directory of third generation images onto the Homer desktop Icon and using option 4 perform OCR to the pages and produces the final (searchable) PDF file.
So that's it so far, I arrived at the initial TIF/No compression (and large files) since I wanted to automate the rotation of the second set of images (left hand pages) with Irfanview, so the same compression algorithm is applied to left and right pages.
A couple of Questions:
As TIF is "Lossless" can I delete the initial none compressed files? I intend keeping the secondary, renumbered, reoriented and compressed Tifs.
Is B&W, 600 DPI, TIF/No compression a sensible (practicable) approach?
I'd welcome your thoughts and comments...