Desktop publishers may often need to incorporate scanned images into their documents. Most scanning software will enable them to scan one document at a time, which means the scanner becomes the bottleneck in the DTP workflow. However, there is a nice feature incorporated into SilverFast Ai Studio, which makes an upgrade to the Studio version a very enticing one to DTP’ers. It’s called Job Manager, and it allows you to batch scan images with each image having its own settings applied.

Just as with colour management, scanning batches of images, requires you to decide whether to scan early or late in the layout process. Most of the time, you can scan your images at low resolution early in the process and when the layout has been approved, scan the images that are effectively being used at their proper resolution. Or you can scan the whole bunch of images, risking to have a lot of them sitting idle on your disk.

With a batch scanning tool you don’t have to choose between these two modes of operation. You can just batch scan all the images at the resolution you will require. The benefit is that you probably know in advance which images are going to accepted right away. Those can be scanned at full resolution immediately.

The ones that are in limbo can be scanned at low resolution first. Right after the batch has finished — which itself can happen when the computer is sitting idle — you can set up a new batch, but this time with all images at full resolution.

With SilverFast Ai Studio’s Job Manager, this gets very easy to do. But there’s more. SilverFast Ai Studio is a Photoshop plug-in, but for most images it doesn’t really need Photoshop as most corrections on colour, sharpness, dust removal, etc, can be done within SilverFast. Which is why there is a front-end to SilverFast that will launch the plug-in without also starting Photoshop.

SilverFast as a stand-alone application allows users to scan images and correct them right inside SilverFast. The advantage of having SilverFast as a stand-alone application is that you can keep the application open all the time. As it doesn’t require half as much the memory Photoshop needs, the layout application will be faster and more responsive to work with, even when SilverFast is scanning images in the background.