Mac OS X makes many computing tasks simpler by having the necessary functionality built into the operating system itself, and scanning images and documents onto your computer’s hard drive is no different. Image Capture is the Mac OS X application that handles all scanning duties for Mac-compatible scanner hardware.
Before beginning to scan your image, make sure that your scanner hardware has been installed and connected to your Mac according to your manufacturer’s instructions, and that your device’s drivers are up to date.
1.) Open Image Capture by clicking on Applications, then Image Capture. Alternatively, you can press Cmd-Spacebar to open Spotlight, type “Image Capture” and press Return.
2.) When Image Capture opens, you need to select the scanner you wish to use from the list of available hardware in the left hand pane. Image Capture will then perform an Overview scan:
3.) At the moment our scanner has no document in it. Place the document or image you wish to scan in the machine and press Overview to update the preview image:
4.) The right hand pane of Image Capture presents us with several options for our scan. We can choose between Color, Black & White and Text options in the Kind drop-down menu:
5.) In the next section down, we can choose the dpi Resolution of the image we want to capture, from web-friendly 75 dpi, through print-standard 300 dpi up to ultra-high definition resolutions. We can alter the Size in centimeters of the image and its Rotation. If we click the Detect Separate Items checkbox, Image Capture will break a larger document such as a form down into its constituent elements, allowing us to easily extract only the images we want:
6.) The next section of the pane contains a field where we can Name the resultant file, and drop-down menus to select its Scan To destination on your hard drive and digital document Format:
7.) If we select Manual in the Image Correction drop-down menu, a selection of image alteration controls appear to tweak the scanned image for the desired result:
8.) Image Capture also allows us to choose a specific area of the document to scan by using a selection bounding box overlaid on the Overview image. Simply grab the round handles to set to your desired area:
9.) When you have tweaked the controls in the right hand pane of Image Capture to your desired settings, press Scan at the bottom right of the interface to commence scanning the document. The resulting digital file will appear at your chosen location:
Image Capture is both easy to use and yet comprehensive in its available options, allowing Mac users to achieve quality scanning results via the same application no matter the brand of their scanning hardware.
hardly easy if you want to scan a document but have to grab the round handles and adjust the image size every time. it's a nightmare.
will welcome any suggestions for how to do it easily..
Sorry but not too useful for a novice user. You cite the obvious, but offer no explicit instructions on how to get rid of the selection boxes with the little handles if one wants to scan an entire text image and not get the various and multiple copies, and more importantly how to straighten the image for the final scan. The little man image in the circle, that I suppose should enable one to set straightening references, is driving me nuts as he resists fine tuning adjustments.
Dan
Jun 6, 2011
And another problem is that this Apple software doesn’t connect to a large number of printer/scanner models, unfortunately including mine.
More freaking Apple marketing lies and BS. It’s never easy and rarely user friendly.
Highlight/click the selection boxes you want to get rid of, then hit delete key to delete them. You may have to do it one at a time. Then create a new box. I used to use the Mac-ized HP Scan software before it was "assimilated" into the Image Capture software. HP Scan was simple and worked wonders for respectable scanned file sizes. Image Capture is a bit more tedious and time consuming (and confusing).