Scanning Photos into PaintShop Pro

If you have boxes or albums of printed photos, PaintShop Pro makes it easy to save them as digital

images. You just need a scanner and a few basic PaintShop tools.

Scanning options naturally depend on your specific scanner, but most scanners have the same basic

output options. As an example, here are the settings for a Canon scanner. For a photo scan, choose to

scan in full color, at a resolution of at least 300 dpi.

You may be tempted to use black and white, or grayscale, when scanning old photos. But keep in mind

that most plugins are designed to work with color images (except for those plugins designed specifically

for black and white). There’s really no need to scan in anything but full color, since the resulting scan will

still look just like the original, and you can always adjust the level of color later.

In this example, the scan output format is TIFF. This is an uncompressed format that provides the highest

quality, but also produces large files. You can also scan to JPG or PNG, both of which use compression

and result in lower file sizes. The PNG format supports transparency, which can be nice, for example, if

you want to place the image over a different background. And some scanners offer different levels of

quality for JPG output. But when in doubt, you can’t go wrong with TIFF.

Your scanner options may enable you to choose the default application that will open the scans when

finished; which in this example is PaintShop Pro.

If you want to skip the intermediate step of producing and saving a scan before opening it in PaintShop

Pro, you can import directly from your scanner. Choose File > Import > From Scanner or Camera.

PaintShop Pro should link to your scanner, and you can click the link shown below to adjust output

quality.

In this example, 300 dpi resolution is selected, and the scan will be in color.

If you’re not importing directly from your scanner, you’ll need to start with a saved scan. In PaintShop

Pro, make sure you’re in the Edit workspace, and open your scanned image.

Here’s the scan that will be used in this example. It was saved as a US-letter sized TIFF file and contains

three photos. The black and white image at the top looks good, but another photo is upside-down, and

the last one is a bit crooked. It’s easy to make errors like this when placing photos face-down on scanner

glass.

In order to save each of these three photos as a separate image file, the best tool to use is the Crop tool.

The default crop size is Free form, which means that you can set any size you want simply by dragging

from corner to corner.

Once the crop size is established, there are several options on the Crop toolbar. If you click Apply, the

rest of the image will be cropped out, leaving just the photo. This is fine if you only need to save the one

photo.

If you want to preserve the original scan, click Crop as New Image. This creates a separate image file for

just the cropped photo.

If you’re viewing files as tabbed documents, which is set in the Window menu, you can easily switch

back and forth between the original scan and individual images.

Returning to the original scan, the next photo can be cropped. The Crop tool enables you to crop to

standard sizes; in this example 5x7 is selected.

The photo to crop now is the upside-down one. So before cropping, the entire scan should be flipped

upside-down by clicking and dragging the rotation handle.

When the photo is right side-up, position the crop rectangle on it. Because the crop size is set as 5x7, the

crop rectangle maintains its proportions as you resize and move.

As before, select Crop to a new image.

Then return to the original scan where the final photo can be copped and saved. Click Clear to remove

the crop rectangle and reposition the scan back to where it was.

The last photo is the slightly crooked one. The tool to fix this is the Straighten tool.

A straight line appears on the image, which you can use to set a horizontal or vertical reference line on

the photo.

Drag the endpoints of the reference line so that it follows the left edge of the photo.

Click Apply in the Property Bar.

The entire scan straightens, relative to this photo.

Now you can crop this photo. If you no longer need the entire scan, you can use Apply instead of Crop to

New Image.

For each of these images, use File > Save As, then decide how you want to use your new photos.