More baseball card scanning tips for collectors.

Here is a first attempt at scanning 6 baseball cards:

Although it looks ok, there are some easily corrected errors. The first thing to know is that RansenScan wants space between the borders of the scanner and the cards. RansenScan will not be able to pick out these cards automatically. But just by moving the cards away from the edges of the scanner "platen" like this...

...means that the program can extract the six cards automatically:

You can see the extrected cards in the "list" on the right of the screen.

Another reason for moving the cards from the scanner edges is that the scanner may miss the edges of your cards. Moving the cards slightly inwards means the scanner sensor is sure to get the whole area of your card.

But there is still a problem, the cards look dark. You can brighten them up automatically by clicking on the automatic contrast enhancement check box in Tool Auto Recog menu:

Now the scan will look like this:

And there is another way to improve the process, if you experiment with the layout of your cards on the scanner platen you may discover a better way of placing the cards. For example:

In the above image you can see that instead of only 6 cards per scan we can do 8. And RansenScan picks all 8 out for you:

The cards are already rotated into the correct position (width vs height) because of another option in RansenScan, how to rotate the final images:

The "End of scan rotation" option is in the Tools | Settings dialog.

Using a large scanner.

If you use a large scanner, the cards may appear smaller, relative to the size of the scanner bed. In that case you may need to set the auto extraction settings as shown here:

More on scanning baseball cards with RansenScan.