Orthoducks

Thank you for your response. There's nothing more to be done here, but in return for responding to my questions, I think you deserve feedback. Twainable won't be useful to me with that limitation. I used to use Paint Shop Pro as an image processing program, mainly for scanning documents and doing simple cleanup operations (flood fill of dirty backgrounds, etc). Windows 7 won't run my old version of PSP, and I found the current version to be a huge, complex thing in which everything is possible and nothing is easy. That started my search for a new image processing program. I thought Paint.NET would be it, but it won't. Its built-in scanner interface doesn't let me adjust contrast, brightness, or resolution;Twainable doesn't support the document feeder. From my point of view those are all utterly basic features, and a program that lacks any of them is simply not adequate for my needs. I understand that there's nothing you can do about document feeder support due to the way Paint.NET forces you to interface with it. I don't know about the built-in interface. But you (and the Paint.NET developers) should be aware that these limitations essentially make the program useless to people for whom scanning is important.

Twainable was recommended to me in another thread, and I posted a report of problems there, but in several days no one responded. I need to try again. When I loaded my document into the document feeder and tried to scan it, Twainable+ read only the first page. It stopped with the first page open in Paint.NET, and the second sheet half way through the scanner. Second, the page it did scan was blank. (No, the orignal was not blank, and was not fed backward!) The device is a Canon MX870 multifunction device. I'm using Paint.NET 4.0 beta under Windows 7 Professional.

pdnnoob, this is a side issue, but what you say seems very strange. Are you saying that you set the color depth with a physical control on the scanner? I've used a half dozen different scanners over the past 15 years or so, and I've never encountered one that worked that way. I have always set the resolution in the driver's UI. I've used several image processing programs too, and I've never seen a serious one that did not have a command for reducing the color depth of an image. (I'm excluding Microsoft Paint as a serious image processing program.) Even Irfanview does that.

I was able to try this (both the beta and Twainable+) today. So far the results are not good. The beta doesn't crash when I try to open the Acquire dialog with the scanner attached, but it works the same way as the released version. I had a couple of problems with Twainable. First, when I loaded my document into the document feeder and tried to scan it, Twainable+ read only the first page. It stopped with the first page open in Paint.NET, and the second sheet half way through the scanner, so that I had to open the scanner up to get it out. Second, the page it did scan was blank. (No, the orignal was not blank, and was not fed backward!) Finally... this isn't a Twainable problem, but it's a problem for me... I can't find a command to reduce the color depth of a scanned image.

I downloaded the beta, but it froze when I tried to open the scan dialog. That's probably because the scanner is not currently attached to my computer; I won't have access to it again until the weekend. I'll try the plug-in then, too. If neither works, I'm afraid that Paint.NET will be a "good, but no cigar" option for me. The whole point of using it is to have something faster and easier to use than the current Paintshop Pro (which I bought, relying on experience with old versions, but returned after trying it). If I have to resort to tricks like scanning in one application and editing in another, that defeats the purpose. And there would be no scanning "in bulk"; my scanning is done on an as-needed basis, one page here and three there. Whateer happens, I'll post the results after I've had a chance to try the beta and the plug-in.

I'm evaluating Paint.NET as a tool for capturing and cleaning up scans of printed matter. So far it appears to be everything I want, with one exception: the scanning process. There are two problems. The first is the "Which device do you want to use?" dialog which appears before every scan. I'm used to having a separate "select source" command which lets me avoid this step: if I don't ask to change the source, I don't get asked to do so. (My system has only one source, making the dialog pointless in any case.) Is there a way to make the dialog not appear every time? Second, the Acquire dialog Paint.NET shows me is different from the one that other applications like Irfanview use, and is much less capable. It has no brightness and contrast settings, for example, and no resolution control. I believe the dialog I'm accustomed to is an accessory to the scanning device's driver, and the one Paint.NET shows me is Paint.NET's very own. How can I make Paint.NET use the standard dialog?