Scanning

During the course of my work, I regularly scan documents and photos. Kind of goes with the territory, I suppose. I'm currently using an Epson Perfection 3170 Photo scanner. It can be set up to do multiple documents with a feeder (or at least it could back when it was sold) but mine is a simple flatbed that takes everything in as I lay it down on the glass.

Scanning takes a while and I have just spent the last three quarters of an hour scanning in 16 photographs for a website. I'm going to need to then edit these photos using Photoshop because the photos have faded a bit and the colors are a little off. I'm also going to need to trim them because the scanner picks up the area around the photo on the flatbed.

Epson's software used to work inside Adobe's Photoshop. But now it doesn't. Took me a while to figure out why.

Epson has written its Epson Scan software for the old Apples that use the Power PC chip. Like most Apple users, I was pretty shocked that Apple switched from their Power PC chips to the Intel x-86 series because Apple made a big deal out of how much more powerful their RISC chips, produced by Motorola and IBM were.

No matter. Apple created software built into its operating system that allows you to transition easily from Power PC to Intel. Because Rosetta handles the difference, virtualizing a Power PC inside an Intel chip, the user cannot really tell that they're running non Intel-native code. Also, I'm sure Apple told Intel that they'd have to continue to make a chip that virtualizes other processors easily and I'm sure Intel was happy to do so. I do note that no Apple computer uses the "trailing edge" Intel processors that many computer manufacturers put in cheap laptops and their cheapest desktop computers.

But here's the problem. If you are using one application that is a Universal Binary (read also has Intel-specific code), it will not accept a "plugin" that goes through Rosetta. And that means the Epson scanner won't scan documents directly into Photoshop, which was my previous workflow for scanning.

Well now, I'm all concerned. A good scanner these days is not free and Epson doesn't send you their new hardware as a trade-in if they have decided to not upgrade their software to the latest Apple operating system. I'm really worried that my Epson Perfection 3170 Photo scanner will be "orphaned" when Apple releases Snow Leopard, an operating system that they've been working on for at least three years and one that does not run on Power PC.

And I would love to go back to my previous workflow. Now, I need to Scan, Save, Open Photoshop, Import Edit, save instead of Scan in Photoshop, Edit, Save.

Anyone out there have a solution?