Photo Scanning Software

You can use scanners to scan text documents and both color and black-and-white images. There are several features you want in a full-featured scanning software, though one of these features may mean you rarely use the scanning program itself.

RGB and CMYK

Color images can specify and separate color in two different ways: RGB and CMYK. RGB stands for red, green and blue, and this is the type of color used on a computer monitor, though some printers may want color images in this format. CMYK stands for the standard four-color separation into cyan, magenta, yellow and black, which most printers use. If you work with printers it is helpful to have a scanner that can do both of these formats.

TWAIN

TWAIN is a standard by which you can interface with your scanner directly from within an image-editing software such as Photoshop, PaintShop Pro or the GIMP. Typically, you select "Acquire" and specify the scanner as the source, and then you don't need to open separate scanning software to scan images.

Optical Character Recognition

Optical character recognition, or OCR, is used when scanning text documents, to turn the document into pure text that can be edited in a word-processing program, rather than treated as an image.

References

• Photography Review: Scanning Software
• TWAIN.org: About TWAIN
• ComputerWorld: QuickStudy: Optical Character Recognition
• Printernational: RGB versus CMYK