I Can't Import Images from Scanner and Technical Support Does Not Exist

[Carol237]

I have Windows 10, and when I try to import an image the only option is to use Windows' WIA (Windows Imaging Application).  Photoshop will not recognize my Canon scanner. Upon googling I have learned that this is not an uncommon problem.

The  WIA dialogue box is beyond horrific and it is crazy difficult to even find settings except for 300ppi in BITMAP format. Changing the default to 600ppi and .tiff or .jpg? Not a prayer. Both Canon and Microsoft have told me that Adobe has intentionally set it's default preferences this way, and only Adobe can change them. The Canon guys told me that Adobe does this to protect itself from piracy.

It would be nice if Adobe could do something about this. It would be even nicer if there were links to chat technical support (I wouldn't dare try a phone call). The ones in the Support section literally bounce back and forth between two pages.

I've spent hours and hours on the phone and in chats with Canon and Microsoft. Somehow, they have technical support. Adobe? Nah, it just pretends to.

[gener7]

I can recommend Vuescan. Many features over WIA including their own 64 bit Twain import. Yes there is a license fee, but it's always actively upgraded at no extra charge.

VueScan Scanner Software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux

[Carol237]

Thank you.

Will Vuescan work in Photoshop but not in Word, etc? Or does it override the Canon driver systemwide?

[jane-e]

@Carol237 

I agree with the others. VueScan from Hamrick creates a scanned image on your hard drive. You can then move it to another folder as you would with any file and open it with any application that supports images. It has worked with every scanner I've ever had.

You pay once and all updates are included. I purchased it well over 20 years ago.

https://www.hamrick.com/

Jane

[Trevor.Dennis]

Photoshop has not supported direct links to scanners since about CS4.  The drivers were too flaky and too likely to cause serious failures, so Adobe removed that feature.  I must admit that I did miss importing directly into Photoshop at first, but it does not feel like much of a hardship nowadays.

[Carol237]

Wow. It always has in Mac, no problem. I just switched to PC, and boy, was this a mistake.

[Carol237]

Trevor Davis, do you happen to know why I can't change the settings in WIA? And what do you do? Open the printer utility to scan and then open in Photoshop? Like I did in 1996?

Anyway, thank you for this information, and I apologize for the duplicates -- I can't seem to edit or delete, it could be the snowstorm slowing down my internet connection.

[Carol237]

Thank you.

Will Vuescan work in Photoshop but not in Word, etc? Or does it override the Canon driver systemwide?

[gener7]

Scanning from within Microsoft Word - Office Watch

Vuescan has a copy/paste function for that.

[rayek.elfin]

Carol237  wrote

Thank you.

Will Vuescan work in Photoshop but not in Word, etc? Or does it override the Canon driver systemwide?

I second Vuescan. I have a Canon Lide scanner, and the old drivers refused to work with Windows 7 and 10. You don't need to install the Canon drivers at all: uninstall them, if you like. Vuescan has its own drivers.

Not only stands Vuescan head and shoulders above the standard Canon software in regards to functionality, the quality of the scans improved as well. Recommended.

[Trevor.Dennis]

One of the problems with the flaky drivers was that everything was moving to 64 bit.  Photoshop started installing 32 and 64 bit versions, which was nice because we could finally access the full 4Gb of RAM, which was as much as most of us had in the days of CS4.  A lot of plugins, and scanner drivers were only available as 32bit, so if you did have Twain support, you needed to access it via the 32 bit version of Photoshop.

By the time CS5 came out, Photoshop was getting hungry for RAM, and 4Gb wouldn't cut it any more.  If you pushed up the memory available to Photoshop, third party plugins and printers would start failing, as they used the system memory not allocated to Photoshop.

So it seems moot that you need to open your scanner driver to import images, as you'd have had to close your 64 bit Photoshop, and open the 32 bit version anyway, which was probably an even more convoluted process.  I can think of no reason why I would want to use Vuscan over the Canon scanning software that came with my MB5360.  I quite like that when it completes a scan, it highlights the file in File Explorer, and I can rename it and open in Photoshop, if that's my intention.  It's a decent workflow, and I am entirely satisfied with it.

[gener7]

Also see if this helps:

Windows is giving the wrong dpi options for my scanner, much too low. - Microsoft Community

[D Fosse]

Yes, Adobe dropped TWAIN support for the reasons Trevor mentioned. And WIA is pretty useless.

Here's an important fact: the TWAIN interface just opened the native scanner driver inside Photoshop. It didn't have any functionality of it own. You get the same functionality by opening the scanner driver directly. The only difference is that it happens outside Photoshop.

While I'm sure Vuescan is an excellent piece of software, it is not strictly necessary. Just find the scanner software on your computer and open it directly.

[Carol237]

Opening the Canon Utility to get to its driver is what I've been doing, but it's a royal pain when I have a lot of scans. From all the answers so far from all of you very generous people here, it appears that I have two options:  

   - use the Canon utility, save the file, and then open in Photoshop, or

   - use Vuescan.

Will VueScan  override Canon's driver in other applications, such as Word? Or is it so much better that I shouldn't care?

I would have thought that Adobe would have moved Windows users past what I used to do with my first scanner in the 90s. 32 bit or 64 bit, this has never been an issue with Mac. Adobe has neglected to deal with this for the largest operating system in the world. (OK, I'm done bitching. At least for now.   )

I deeply appreciate everyone's answers.

[gener7]

You  can trial Vuescan and it will coexist with your Canon software, not overwrite it.

[Abambo]

We used to use the 32bit Ps for scanning via TWAIN, but today, we use the Canon scanner software to scan to a file and edit that in Ps if needed. There is no drawback against our old workflow.

[Terri_Stevens]

There may be a misunderstanding here. Vuescan doesn't replace the manufacturers driver as far as I can make out, but instead it augments it's functions. If you do not load the manufacturers software onto the machine Vuescan will not detect the presence of the scanner. Alternatively disabling the scanner driver in Device Manager will also prevent VueScan finding the scanner. You get an error message like this.

When Vuescan is correctly recognising the scanner an entry is present under File/Import and you can scan directly into Photoshop , but this is not always the best way as scanners consume vast chunks of memory if resolutions are set high then the import process can

be very slow due to that.

Having said that VueScan is head and shoulders better than any manufacturers software I have seen. It has a few intermittent bugs but is well worth the money if you have already paid for an expensive scanner. Strangely enough it probably is at it's most impressive with the cheap sub $90 scanners as it corrects a lot of the deficiencies-however then the cost of the software becomes an issue. For Word and programs that don't support scanner interfaces simply use VueScan standalone and save to a file. VueScan has a batch scanning mode

Scanning many photographs in a batch

I can't say I've used this but I imagine with a document feeder it can save a lot of time.

[D Fosse]

To complete the picture it should also be said that, for high-quality reproduction, flatbed scanners are becoming a bit obsolete.

With today's high resolution camera sensors, and a good macro/flat-field lens, you will actually get better results photographing than scanning. An excellent lens to use for this is e.g. the absolutely fantastic Micro-Nikkor 60mm/2.8. It also helps if you have a repro stand or you can convert an old enlarger into one.

You get higher effective resolution with more usable detail, and more importantly, much less chromatic aberration (partial misalignment of channels). This is what finally caused me to throw out my Epson V500. This is a detail from a 35mm transparency scanned to 4700 x 6800 native scanner resolution - so obviously CA is exaggerated here compared to a larger original. But still:

The problem is that this is impossible to correct other than manually by painting over, because the misalignment is local/random and not following a concentric "lens" pattern. It seems to be connected to the scanner head movement and/or local contrast.

[Carol237]

I hope I'm not junking up anyone's email inbox by saying this forum thread and all of you are truly awesome. Just wow.

I'll give VueScan a try, and also see if I can find a table tripod or stand with horizontal extension clamp (if that's the right terminology)  for my camera.

Thank you all.

[Md38582842zt4b]

hoe to solve could not compelet the import command because of a problem with the scanner. My computer Intel R cor i (2) windows 7 64 bit opareting system and the scanner insttal adobe photoshop 7.0 HP Desk Jet Ink advante 1515

[carol_700]

A community member replied that Adobe dropped this feature way back with CS4.  How do folks DEAL with it?  Do you scan, save to file, and open file in photoshop?   I've used Photoshop for almost 25 yrs. and have never had a problem before. This is SUCH a pain!!!

[D Fosse]

If you're referring to the old TWAIN plugin, that's correct. It was abandoned around 2010 when computers became 64-bit native. A 64 bit TWAIN was never developed. So from CS4, there was little point in Photoshop supporting it.

As for how people deal with it - the TWAIN plugin never did anything more than call the native scanner driver. The only difference was that you accessed the scanner software from within Photoshop, instead of outside it. But it's the same software, with the same capabilities and functions, and you get exactly the same result.

Most of us who did this quickly tired of looking at a green progress bar while Photoshop was locked and inaccessible. So we actually preferred to run the scan directly in the scanner software, and scan to disk, while doing other things in Photoshop.