Adjusting Scanner Settings

Overview

The Scanner Image Control window allows control over scanner settings. For all scanners, contrast, resolution, paper size, output format, page orientation, and page type can be adjusted. Certain scanners have additional image processing capabilities which are not available on all models. These advanced capabilities include bar-code recognition, patch code recognition, skew detection and removal, image crop, and annotation.

Procedure to Adjust Scanner Settings Common to All Devices

NOTE: The available ranges or values for these controls can vary, based upon individual scanner capabilities. Be aware that changing the scanner type may invalidate some of these settings.

  1. Click on the [Image Control] button to open the Scanner Image Control window.

  • Contrast - Selects the image contrast on a uniform, scanner independent scale. Choosing a lower value will lighten the image and choosing a higher value will darken the image. Scanners with built-in automatic contrast control may ignore this setting unless that feature is disabled.

  • Resolution - Selects the resolution of the image in dots per inch. Some scanners will not support all values that appear in the drop-down list. 200 dpi is an industry-wide standard for black and white archived documents and 300 dpi is used occasionally for detailed work, barcoding, and optical character recognition. Higher values result in a substantially larger file size on disk with a negligible gain in quality.

  • Paper Size - Selects the size of the documents being scanned without respect to orientation. This setting should match or exceed the physical dimensions of the material being scanned. The resulting image will be exactly this dimension, including any annotation.

  • Page Orientation - Selects the orientation of the information on the pages being scanned.

    • Portrait orientation is when the top and bottom of the image are the short dimension of the paper size.

    • Landscape orientation is when the top and bottom of the image are the long dimension of the paper size.

    • Rotated Portrait is available on certain scanners with wide feeders to allow the paper to feed sideways through the mechanism, thus reducing the time for each page to be scanned.

  • Page Type - Selects single or double sided scanning. The scanner must support duplex scanning if double sided is selected. In double sided mode, two images will be saved for each physical page scanned.

  • Output Format - Selects the image file format. Available formats depend on the scanner interface being used.

  • [Advanced Scanner Features] - Additional processing features are available inside Image-Master when a Kofax interface card is used in conjunction with a scanner.

  • [Test Scan] - Choosing this button causes a single page to be scanned from the scanner and displayed in the viewer using the current settings as described above. Any job in progress is unaffected by this operation except that pages fed through the document feeder will have to be returned to the input tray prior to the resumption of the scanning job. Use this feature to verify that the chosen image control settings produce the desired results.

  • [Save] - Keeps the new settings.

  • [Cancel] - Abandons all changes.

  1. If the [Save] button is selected, the Save Settings dialog box opens:

  • [This Session Only] - Settings are saved for use in the current scanning session only. These settings will be discarded, and the default settings reloaded as soon as the Scanning Module window is closed.

  • [Make Settings Permanent] - Settings are saved as the default settings for the current image database and will apply to the current session.

  • [Cancel] - Abandon all changes to the settings and return to the Scanning Module window.

Related Topics

Scanning Documents Introduction