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The Basics: Software

Image editing software

Which software you use depends on what you are digitizing. If you are digitizing images, Photoshop or something similar is vital. The GIMP is a similar program that is free.

Whenever possible you want to avoid having to edit the images at all. You want your scan to have good lighting, good white balance, and a good crop box before you touch it with a program. It saves time and saves the image from unnecessary tampering.

All image editing software works off of different algorithms. This is why the same function will work differently in different programs. The more expensive and popular software (like Photoshop) has good algorithms that may produce better results.

The basic functions you want in an image editing software:
· color correction
· cropping
· brightness/contrast correction


Text image processing software

If you are scanning mostly text, then you need a totally different kind of program. If you are doing text, then you are likely doing books, newspapers (stuff that has a lot of pages). You will probably also want OCR (Optical Character Recognition ), so you can make the text searchable.

In order to make Text from a scan readable, the scan has to be as clear as possible, as level as possible, and as clean as possible. This means that when you are looking at text image processing, you want these basic functions:

· Batch processing (many images in a batch without human interaction)
· Crop
· Conversion to bi-tonal (black and white) or grayscale
· De-skew (leveling the image based on lines of text)- There is actually a plugin for deskewing for GIMP


Many companies that sell digitization equipment will have some piece of software that takes care of these issues. Check around, and ask.

In addition to a program that can to the above, you need a separate program to OCR. The program I’ve heard used most often is AABBY Finereader. It creates a PDF with searchable text.

That's the basic software.

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