Elements comes bundled with many scanners because it’s the perfect program for making scans look their best. You have two main ways of getting scanned images into Elements. Some scanners come with a driver plug-in, a little program that lets you scan directly into Elements. Look on your scanner’s installation software for info about Elements compatibility, or check the manufacturer’s website for a Photoshop plug-in to download. (If the scanner lets you scan into Photoshop, you should be able to scan into Elements, too.) You may also be able to scan into Elements if your scanner uses the TWAIN interface, an industry standard used by many scanner manufacturers.
Figure 2-5. Elements can open multipage PDFs. To open just one page of the file, double-click the page’s thumbnail. To open multiple pages, Ctrl-click/⌘-click the ones you want, or Shift-click to select a range and then double-click to open them. You can catalog PDF files in the Organizer, too. To do that, go to File→“Get Photos and Videos”→“From Files and Folders,” and, in the drop-down menu in the bottom part of the window (on a Mac it’s labeled “Enable”), choose PDF Files, and then navigate to the PDF you want to import.
Note
In Elements 10, you’ll need to move the Adobe TWAIN driver (Twain_32.8ba), if your scanner requires it, before you can scan into Elements. In Windows, go to C:\Program Files [Program Files(x86) for 64-bit systems]\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 10\Optional Plug-Ins\Import-Export, find the Adobe TWAIN driver, and move it to C:\Program Files [Program Files(x86) for 64-bit systems]\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 10\Locales\en_US\Plug-Ins\Import-Export (the “en_US” part will be different if you aren’t in the US).
On a Mac, go to Applications→Adobe Photoshop Elements 10→Support Files→Optional Plug-Ins→ImportModules, and move TWAIN.plugin from there into Applications→Adobe Photoshop Elements 10→Support Files→Plug-Ins→Import Modules. For the App Store version, go to Applications and Right-click/Control-click Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 Editor and choose Show Package Contents→Contents and move TWAIN.plugin from Optional Plug-ins→ImportModules to Plug-ins→ImportModules. (When you start to move it, you’ll see a message warning that plug-ins can’t be modified. Click Authenticate and enter your OS X account password, and then you’ll be able to move it.)
If you have a Mac, you need to be aware that not all Photoshop-compatible plug-ins will work with Elements 10. If you install your scanner, launch Elements, and then see a window that says, “One or more plug-ins are currently not available…” that usually means that your scanner plug-in isn’t compatible with Elements 10, probably because you’re trying to run a PowerPC plug-in on your Intel Mac. Here’s why that’s important: Beginning with Elements 8, Adobe decided not to let Elements run in Rosetta, the part of OS X that allows programs written for the older PowerPC Macs (G5 and earlier) to run on Intel Macs (newer Macs that use Intel processors). So your old scanner plug-in isn’t going to work in Elements 10.
There are a couple of workarounds: If you’re using Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), you can keep an older version of Elements around for scanning, if you have one, or you can use the standalone scanner software that your scanner manufacturer may provide. (In OS X 10.7 [Lion], Rosetta isn’t available for any program.) In OS X 10.6 and 10.7, you can also scan from Preview and send the scan straight to Elements. To do that, launch Preview with your scanner connected and then go to File→“Import from Scanner.” You can even tell Preview to send your scan to Elements when you’re done scanning. However, if you have a really old scanner, the scanning features in 10.6 or 10.7 may not acknowledge its existence, in which case you have to use the software provided by the manufacturer.
To control your scanner from within Elements, you can scan from the Editor and (in Windows) the Organizer. In the Editor, go to File→Import, and you’ll see your scanner’s name in the list that appears. In the Windows Organizer, go to File→“Get Photos and Videos”→From Scanner, or press Ctrl+U. You should check out your available options for both locations because they’re probably different. For instance, you may find that you have different file formats available to you in the Editor than you do in the Organizer.
If you don’t have an Elements plug-in for your scanner and the Adobe TWAIN driver doesn’t work for you, you’ll need to use the software that came with your scanner. Then, once you’ve saved your scanned image in a format that Elements understands, like TIFF (.tiff, .tif) or Photoshop (.psd), open the file in Elements like you would any other photo. (File Formats Elements Understands explains which formats Elements can use.)
Tip
If you do a lot of scanning, check out the Divide Scanned Photos command (Straightening Scanned Photos), which lets you quickly scan in lots of photos at the same time. Also, you can save yourself a lot of drudgery in Elements if you make sure that both your scanner’s glass and the prints you’re scanning are as dust-free as possible before you start.