Expanding the canvas

[quarter125]

I am a total noob at image editing, so this might be ridiculously easy. I have a scan of a book I need to read for school. The professor scanned the book face down so each page is two pages of the book and it is rotated clockwise of how it should be read. I am trying to get some kind of OCR to work on it, so I want to get each page of the book separate. The goal is to get to the point where I can read and underline text on my Kindle.

Here's where paint.net comes in. I have already taken screen shots of the pdf and split the pages into separate images using ctrl+alt+V so they are already split. Now I am trying to make them all stacked on top of each other like say a Word document would be. I cannot figure out how to expand the canvas to allow the image I want to paste in to show up. It only shows up on top of the image that is already there. I can expand the canvas, but anywhere the new image crosses outside the perimeter of the one already there, it only shows the gray checkered pattern. Hope this makes sense, anyone know how to do this?

[toe_head2001]

Dude, you're making this way too hard than it needs to be. Leave it as a PDF, and just run the OCR function that's built into Adobe Acrobat. If you don't have Acrobat, Google Docs does OCR on PDFs as well.

Edited August 25, 2012 by toe_head2001

[pdnnoob]

toe_head is probably right, but I hardly have any experience with adobe acrobat, so I wouldn't know. As far as what you are doing goes, though...I couldn't tell what exactly you are doing, but I think I understand what you are trying to do.

First thing I would do is figure out what the image dimensions need to be to fit all the pages. If it is any larger than 6000 pixels in any direction, I would recommend you try something different. Editing large images uses a lot of RAM and may require a ton of processing power as well.

If, however, the image doesn't end up being too big, here's what I would do:

Start by creating a new image with the image dimensions you calculated above.

Paste your first image and move it to where you want it.

Paste the second image into a new layer and move it to the desired position.

Merge the layers and repeat for the remaining images.