Scanning Images

An Epson scanner is available in the CS lab for making digital scans of images. The scanner is next to the printer and is attached to the computer named cslab7. (When the scanner is accessed after a period of inactivity, it takes a while to warm up. Give it time; you will see the light on the front blinking while it is warming up.)

You can use either of the (badly named) programs kooka or xsane for scanning. On the KDE desktop, Kooka and XSane are available in the "Graphics" sub-menu of the "K" menu. Of course, you can also use the commands kooka and xsane on the command line. If you use the Gimp image processing program, you can scan an image by using the command named something like "XSane: Epson..." in the "Acquire" sub-menu of the "File" menu in Gimp's main Toolbox window. This command will use XSane to scan an image directly into a Gimp image window.

When you start up kooka, you will first get a small dialog box that asks you confirm that you want to use the Epson scanner. Once you confirm this, a window will open that you can use for controlling the scanner. You might have to increase the size of this window. Here is part of this window being used to scan an image of a fish:

kooka window

You will have to change some settings in the window before you do the scan. In the lower left section of the window, you probably want to set the "Scan mode" to "Color" so that you can scan a color image. You probably want to set the "Resolution" to 72 or 75 if you are going to use the image on the Web. you might want a higher resolution if you are going to print the image or use it some other high-quality context.

To scan the image, place the image on the glass of the scanner and close the lid. You should first make a preview scan. Click on the "Preview" tab at the top of the window, so that you can see the preview! Click the "Preview Scan" button at the bottom of the window to do the scan. Now, click-and-drag on the preview image in the upper left portion of the window to outline the part of the image that you want to include in the final scan. Click the "Final Scan" button at the bottom of the window to do the scanning.

As soon as the final scan completes, Kooka will pop up a dialog box that forces you to choose an image type. JPEG and PNG are usually reasonable choices (JPEG for photographic images, PNG for images that are largely patches of uniform color such as drawings and many computer-generated images).

Kooka saves the images that you scan in a "gallery". To see a list of the images in your gallery, click on the "Gallery" tab at the top of the Kooka window. To save an image to another location, right-click on an image name in this list and select "Save Image" from the pop-up menu that appears. You might want to delete unwanted images from your gallery to save disk space. Just right-click the image name and select "Delete Image".

Another way to work with your scanned image is to select the command "Open Image in Graphics Application" from Kooka's "ImageCanvas" menu. You will get a dialog box where you can select the graphics application. I suggest that you type in "gimp" and press OK. This will start Gimp and open the image in a Gimp image window so that you can use all of the Gimp's image processing tools.

XSane main window The XSane program has several windows. It's main window is shown at the right. You will also need the Preview window, where preview scans are displayed. If it is not already open, you can open it by selecting the "Show Preview" command in the "View" menu in XScan's main window. The default settings in the main window are probably acceptable, so don't worry about them unless something goes wrong.

To make a scan, place the image in the scanner. Hit the "Acquire Preview" button at the bottom of the Preview window. When the preview scan is complete, click-and-drag on the preview to select the area that you want to include in your final scan. Then go back to the main window and click the "Start" button. When the scan is complete, the scanned image will appear in a new window. That window will have a "File" menu with a "Save" command that you can use to save the image. Give the file a name ending in ".jpg" if you want to save a JPEG image. Use a file name ending in ".png" if you want to save a PNG image.

If you use the "Acquire" / "XScan:Epson" command in the Gimp's "File" menu to scan an image, everything is the same as when you use XSane directly, except that the final scanned image will go into a Gimp image window instead of an XSane image window. At that point, you can use all of Gimp's tools on the image, and you can save it using the usual Gimp "Save" command. (To find the "Save" command in the Gimp, right-click on an image and go the the "File" sub-menu in the pop-up menu that appears).