A: Scanning a photograph (or other image) to jpeg file

1. Place your document on the scanner bed and ensure that the scanner is turned on.
   
   
2. Launch the EPSON Scan application (located in the Applications folder). Once you have launched the application you will see the set of controls shown at left.
   
   
3. Choose appropriate settings and click the Preview button.
   
   Remember: the higher the scanning resolution, the larger the image file that will result. If you are scanning the image for use in a print-based project, use 300DPI as the scanning resolution; if you are scanning for a web-based project, or simply to send a digital copy of a photograph to a friend via email, use 72DPI.
   
   
4. The preview scan will show the entire scanner bed with your document positioned on it. Click and drag with the crosshair cursor to select the region you want to scan, re-check the settings, then click the Scan button. This will bring up a second dialogue box asking where to save the resulting jpeg image.
   
   
5. Specify a folder location for the scanned image to be saved, a naming convention for the image file name(s); and an image format.
   
   By default the scanned images will be saved as jpegs in your Pictures folder, and will be named "img00n.jpg". Once you have selected the appropriate settings, begin the final high-resolution scan by clicking "OK".

If you wish to do further edits to the scanned image (cropping, further scaling) you can use Photoshop.

B: Scanning a text document for editing

1. Place your document on the scanner bed and ensure that the scanner is turned on.
   
   
2. Launch Adobe Acrobat Pro (located in the Adobe CS4 Design Premium folder icon in the dock at the bottom of the screen) and select "Scan to PDF..." from the Documents menu; you will see the set of controls shown at left.
   
   
3. In the Input section of the controls, select the appropriate scanner model from the menu (in the Publab select "EPSON Perfection V500"; in the Mac lab select "EPSON Perfection 3490/3590"). In the Output section of the controls choose "New PDF document". In the Document section of the controls, check the "Make Searchable (Run OCR)" checkbox (OCR stands for "Optical Character Recognition").
   
   Click the Scan button, which will take you to the EPSON controls (shown above in section A: "Scanning a photograph")
   
   
4. Do a preview scan as described in section A: "Scanning a photograph"; then click and drag with the crosshair cursor to select the text region you want to scan and OCR. Note that, since you will be generating an editable text document rather than an image, the scanning resolution you use is not that important.
   
   
5. Click the Scan button to scan and OCR the selected text box to an untitled PDF file.
   
   Adobe Acrobat's "Scan and OCR" function will attempt to recognize and preserve the original document's text fonts, layout and styling, and the attempt is what you will see in the resulting untitled PDF file.
   
   
6. Choose the format you wish to save your scanned text file in.
   
   If you like what you see on-screen in your untitled PDF (including Adobe Acrobat's guess at the original document's font family and font styles) then you can preserve the scanned and OCRed text either as a PDF file or as a Microsoft Word file. Choose Save as..." from the File menu, and then select "Adobe PDF Files" or "Microsoft Word Document" from the Format menu.
   
   In most cases, though, you will want to re-style (and probably edit) the text -- in which case you will be better off to strip off all the text styling and save your document as a simple text file. Choose Save as..." from the File menu, and then select "Text (Plain)" from the Format menu. If you wish to do further edits to the scanned and OCRed text, you can open the ".txt" file in Microsoft Word (right-click on the ".txt" file, go into the "Open With" popup menu and select Microsoft Word).