SkanKromsator 5.91 Tutorial

(To kromsate comes from the Russian verb ‘кромсать’ – ‘to cut to pieces’,

in this tutorial it means ‘to process the scans’)

This tutorial is designed for a book scanned in TIFF images, greyscale, 300 dpi, to be converted into 600 dpi black-and-white TIFFs, for making a nice PDF.

a) Run the program and load the image files into it (File > Open images…, the list of files appears in the left top corner, tools tabs are under it.)

b) Choose the path for the resulting files output (Files tab), the default is the “out” folder in the folder containing the images. Also, in this tab you can assign the way of numbering of the output files, and, very important, assign output resolution of 600 dpi.

c) Then we begin the draft kromsate procedure: In the toolbar at the top, to the left of the button labeled Process!, find the button with the scissors, Draft kromsate (illus. on the right), press it, there opens a dialog box (illus. below), put a tick near Split pages and Safe top/bottom and click the OK button (If the first and/or last page(s) are single, i.e. not a spread, you can pre-process them separately (field Kromsate = Current), respectively, no need for them to put the Split pages tick). In this dialog box, you can also rotate the pages the way you need.

d) In 5-15 minutes (depending on the number of the pages in your book):

cutterscutters’handles

Notice the thin blue lines, those are the cutters, beyond them everything will be mercilessly cut off, and the page will be divided in two (see the central cutters). Each cutter has a handle, if you click the right mouse button over it, you will see a number of actions you can do with them. Notice, that next to the names of the pages the green ticks have appeared.

e) It is a short but a very important stage - setting the options. To do this, let us go through the tabs (on the left, below the files’ list).

• Page - Here we set up the page centring method. The default is A - automatic, which means placing the image in the upper left corner of the page. But, as a rule (this is my way), horizontal alignment is placed in the center (Page h. align) C, the vertical one (Page v. align) is bottom, B or top, T, it all depends on the original layout of the book. Despeckle - deleting fine dust and dots. Deskew - levelling the rotation angle of a page, if, after the kromsating, the page is still not levelled, it can be changed using the method of Art (the inclusion of this method for each page slows down the process), or Ortho if the text on this page is deployed at 90 degrees. (I never use Art or Ortho.)

For this option to be applied to all the pages of the book, when choosing it we hold the Ctrl button pressed. Similarly, hold the Ctrl button, when you select other options, which apply to all pages at once. • Book tab sets the size of the output pages; we leave Page

width and height to Auto. In the H. Gap value we set 200 (or 250) pixels, this value is usually for treatment of 600 DPI, but if you want the other field sizes, you can pick up any value, as you like.

• In the Files tab, as stated above, set the output DPI to 600 (otherwise, no good will come out). This is super-important; it affects the whole final result.

• In the Options tab, set Deskew method to Auto (shear), for the Despeckle we set Safe or Fine+Normal, which is an intellectual method of cleaning. For example, it will not clean the dots over i and j. You can also move the sliders of Text sensitivity two or three points, so that the cutters do not cut off the page numbers standing away from the page text.

• We skip Options 2 tab.

• Convert tab – here we set the threshold for conversion from grayscale to black-and-white. To Convert to b/w choose the MiddleDark threshold. Do not forget to hold the Ctrl key while selecting this options, intended for all pages. But, no one can stop you from making an experiment for your scan and choosing another option. LowDark can be nice, too ☺

• Well, finally, the last, but a very important tab, Quality. In Enhance image we put ticks near Blur and Sharpen, values for them are usually 1 or 2 (the setting of these options and their values are not a dogma, you can experiment, but first put them as in the illustration image), with 2 the result will be bolder, choose it according to the font your scanned book.

And, again, it is very important, if you have your scans in grayscale, then click on the Gray enhance dialogue and there appears the Gray image enhance dialogue window, go to the Illumination tab, where you put the green tick mark near the Correct illumination. With this option, the leveling of the illumination (this is especially important for the center of a spread) is done, which removes the black smudges and lots of garbage specks. An indispensable thing. Here, in this window, scroll and find the Denoise tab, put there a tick near Enable, and the parameters as shown:

That is all. All the parameters for kromsating are set up, so, for you not to suffer this long setting procedure every time you make a book, you can create your own profile with all these settings recorded in it: File > Profiles… > Export All these settings are saved into the profile file that can be found in the SkanKromsator folder I share. To load that, go to File > Profiles… > Import , and then choose my profile.sktp file from the SkanKromsator installation folder. Press the Apply button after that. f) The most boring, but, fortunately, not a very long stage. It is necessary to go through all the pages, in order to verify the placement of cutters and the allocation of illustrations, if any. If you see that the cutters are not set correctly for a page, then they must be corrected. Move the cutter, if the automatic placement set it in a wrong position. Optimally, we do it this way: we put the left hand, responsible for navigating through the pages, on the keyboard, on the buttons q (back) and w (forward), the right hand is on the mouse, with which we move the cutters, if necessary. If you are sure that the position of a cutter will be the same for a number of pages, then you can copy the cutter’s position to other pages by pressing the right mouse button on the cutter handle and selecting the option needed (Copy current position to…). Sometimes a page is located at an angle, or a shadow in the center between the pages is wider at one end, in such cases we can set the cutters at an oblique angle, just hold Shift and move the handle of a cutter with the mouse, it is faster than cleaning the page manually later. Here is an example of a slightly rotated page, the upper cutter is oblique:

g) If the page has black-and-white photos, color, or greyscale illustrations, this program has a special mode of processing them, the so-called Picture Zones. Select the image rectangle with the mouse and click on the Mark as picture zone button. If the illustration has an irregular shape or it is rectangular, but obliquely scanned (as in the illustration above), then you can use the Polygon selection, its icon is in the form of an irregularly shaped star.

After kromsating, the images thus selected will be placed in separate files, see the details below. h) By the way, do you know that so as not to do it all over again, the job can be saved (the main menu, File > Save Task) It’s high time to do it now! i) Click the big Process! button.

Here comes the warning, whether we are sane enough to change the resolution to the twice-greater one, but we do not care anymore, we have already made our choice. Everything is now up to the computer. There is a good news, this version of the program kromsates at the rate of 6 spreads (12 pages) per minute. After a while, 20-30 minutes later, in the folder we specified earlier, we find the results, review them carefully, there can be pages not aligned properly. We have to adjust them. It is done in a separate application, Result view, which is launched right after the kromsation is finished. Here, first of all, I press the Autosave mode button:

It is needed for us not to confirm saving of each page, after we have edited it. In the Result view we act like in ScanKromsator: we put the left hand, responsible for navigating through the pages, on the keyboard, on the buttons q (back) and w (forward), the right hand is on the mouse. Our task here is to delete the occasional dust left after the automatic despeckling, and to correct the pages alignment, if the automatic correction made some mistakes. Erasing the dust can be done in two ways:

- using the Eraser tool (press the E button to enable the eraser)

- or by selecting an area by dragging the mouse with the left button pressed, and pressing the C (Clean) button, which will erase everything in the area selected. Changing the zoom with the mouse wheel, you can erase even a single pixel.

To correct the page position, we may rotate the page or move it, to make a better centring.

- To correct the rotation, select an area by dragging the mouse with the left button pressed, and press the R button (Rotate):

In the Rotate selection dialog box, change the angle with your mouse, Left and Right options stand for the rotation direction. Press the Paste and merge button in the end.

- To move a selection, select an area by dragging the mouse with the left button pressed, and press the M button (Move). Drag the selected area with the mouse, and then click anywhere outside the page, or click the page with the right mouse button and choose Merge pasted. (Illustration below.)

It is not necessary to kromsate the whole book at once; you can do it by parts. Just set the page size option for every part: Book > Page width > Fixed, and enter the same size as in the previous part.

Processing photos and color illustrations

We have the description of photos and color illustrations processing in a separate chapter of the manual, although it is done in ScanKromsator during the stage of checking the cutters position. To process such illustrations the so-called Picture zones are used. Select an illustration by dragging the mouse with the left button pressed, and press the Mark as picture zone button on the toolbar:

To customize the Picture zone options, double-click on the highlighted area, the Picture zone properties dialog box appears, there you should set the color of the image, the default is Gray. (Illustration below.)

After the kromsating, the color illustrations are put into separate files, so this whole thing is for advanced users and aesthetes. After that we need to merge them with the pages of the book. To do this, simply select the menu item Zones > Picture Zone > Merge zones... and click Done. There is one bad side of having illustration in the book: if there is a greyscale photo in a page, the whole page will be converted to greyscale after the merging, and this will make the page size 8 times bigger… That’s all I know about this program. Feel free to share any information about it that is not in this manual. Good luck, my friends!

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