How do I get Acrobat to scan using my Epson printer color settings?

Hi Adwul,

When you're scanning from within Acrobat, you ARE scanning with your software's scanning software. And, depending on the software, you might have fewer options than scanning directly. Assuming that you're on a PC, Acrobat uses a piece of software called Twain to connect Acrobat and your scanner's software. Because of this, sometimes it IS better to use the software directly rather than through Acrobat.

When you're having issues with colors, I have to ask if you have your monitor and your scanner calibrated. I do not know if you're old enough but "back in the old days," you'd walk into a TV store filled with cathode ray tube TVs and every one of them was set to the same station, and everyone looked different. While flat-screen TVS have much better default calibration, they are still off. The calibration process essentially goes through anywhere from 80-150 different colors and makes sure that what's red in one is THE EXACT SAME RED in the other. In all honesty, the most likely user of this is either printing companies and professional photographers.

Now, back to your situation: are you saving the documents as png-8 or png-24? This is important as png-8 is what's called indexed color and can easily be shifted way off of the actual colors. I have a strong hunch that this is what your issue is.

What I strongly recommend you do is scan to the TIF format. There are two advantages to this: one is that TIF does use Indexed colors and is not lossy (like jpg images are). So any color you scan is much less likely to be radically shifted as you're seeing. The 2nd advantage is that you can take these TIF images from your desktop, drag them onto the Acrobat icon in your Startup strip (or Dock if you're on a Mac) and they will automatically be converted into a PDF. If you drag multiple TIF images onto the Acrobat icon, Acrobat will ask if these should be saved as one document or independent documents. Then you just sit back, and they will be PDFed and OCRed. 

Good luck!

You might check the manual of you scanner, if you can set up any color settings for scanning. There may be different settings used when scanning via twain or directly into a PDF file. Acrobat cannot control the scanner settings remotely. It simply receives the image data from the twain driver. If you use the Custom Scan option from Acrobats scan menu you should see the user interface of the twain driver where you can set up the scan. Those options aren't shared with Acrobat so you may have to set them everytime again to get the wanted results.