Scanning with iPhone and minimal special equipment. Many questions.

Built a scanner? Started to build a scanner? Record your progress here. Doesn't need to be a whole scanner - triggers and other parts are fine. Commercial scanners are fine too.

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Avenger2000
Posts: 1
Joined: 21 May 2022, 18:24
E-book readers owned: Kindle
Number of books owned: 100
Country: USA

Scanning with iPhone and minimal special equipment. Many questions.

Post by Avenger2000 »

I have an iPhone, an adjustable arm I can place it on, and an extra light source and I think an extra tripod I can place the light on. I also have a remote shutter button.

Should I take the pictures from the iPhone camera app and then process through ScanTailor? Or is there a better iPhone app to capture the images? Also I loaded a quick image into ScanTailor Advanced. It seems to take forever for each step of processing a single double page image from the iPhone. Is this normal?

Or should I just use an iPhone app like vFlat to scan and correct the image with the iPhone? Problem is that there is no manual adjustment in vFlat so if the crop is off it seems you have to fix it in another app or computer application. What app/application should I use for fixing the crop? Or do people have a better iPhone app than vFlat that they use?

Final Question. Should I hold the book down with my fingers or should I place a piece of glass over it? Or is that only for DIY scanners that have a V-shaped cradle that I read about here? If you just put the glass flat on the book, would there be too many reflections?

Thank you in advance for your patience with my questions.
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Mohib
Posts: 107
Joined: 05 Apr 2014, 21:15
Number of books owned: 0
Country: Canada

Re: Scanning with iPhone and minimal special equipment. Many questions.

Post by Mohib »

Hi,

You might want to take a look at my scanner for SmartPhones.

Building plans and video are here (lots of info and tips through the whole thread):
viewtopic.php?p=20596#p20596

Software I wrote to pre-process the images (i.e. collate and scale left/right images) before using ScanTailor is described here:
viewtopic.php?p=20683#p20683

Current version of the software for download is here:
viewtopic.php?p=22479#p22479

As for iPhone camera software, I use: Camera+ (now Camera +2) because it has all manual controls and can provide (almost) uncompressed JPEG images:
https://camera.plus/

Hope this helps
Mohib
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