AV News 183 - February 2011
Photoshop CS5
Restoring the Lost Plug-ins Legacy
Keith Scott FRPS
One regular reader of AV News states, that after studying various articles and
reports he decided to upgrade from his rather elderly version of Adobe
Photoshop to the current CS5 version. But after doing so was quite
disappointed to find that he could no longer import images directly into
Photoshop from either of his existing film or flatbed scanners. When trying to
import i.e. scan from such external equipment he was faced with connectivity
options on the Photoshop 'Import menu' that included 'WIA Support', but his
Nikon film and Epson flatbed scanners were not recognised, both of which
had been readily available with his much older Photoshop.
This reader then asks
'what is WIA support' and
'does Photoshop CS5 have
the ability to recognise his
old scanners', or 'has he
wasted his money only to
find that CS5 has fewer
practical interfaces' and
does he now have to spend
more money updating his scanners? The major issue for this particular
reader is; he has a massive catalogue of slides and negatives dating back
many years, of which he frequently makes high quality scans to produce
exhibition prints and also smaller resolution scans for AV's. Therefore being
able to scan his images is of paramount importance. It's good news for our
reader because it isn't necessary to spend more money updating scanners.
Photoshop CS5 can easily recognise his existing equipment, but it will cost
him a few minutes of his time to enable it to do so.
Let's first understand just what WIA Support means. Windows Image
Acquisition (WIA) is a development built on the Microsoft Still Image
Architecture that was introduced in a basic form with Microsoft Windows 98
and ME operating systems; it's current and more advanced state of
development enables graphics software to communicate with imaging
hardware and provides support for WIA ready devices such as scanners,
cameras and digital video equipment. WIA supports digital still cameras and
both low-end and high-end scanners; it also enables the retrieval of still
images from IEEE 1394-based digital video (DV) camcorders and Universal
Serial Bus (USB) web cameras. WIA is a widely used international
standardized interface and is considered by some to be more flexible than the
requirements of TWAIN, which usually required bundling of item specific
software and appropriate drivers. The basic TWAIN interface which allowed
imaging equipment to talk to the computer has been around since 1992,
therefore its origins are considered older technology. However the current
standard of TWAIN is at version 2.1 and was only released in July of 2009.
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