How to batch stitch odd & even pages scanned from a book? 1

[may1hem]

Hi, I have scanned in the pages of a book that I bought. I want to have a copy on my laptop for reference.

I have all the pages numbered as: Page001.jpg etc, and I want to join the odd and even pages so that Page001 and Page002 are stitched together as 1 image. This will make it easier to read.

How can I automate the joining of pages? Can I do this with Photoshop or do I need a specialised program? Can anyone recommend?

Thanks,

May

 

[SPYDERIX]

Hi,

You will not be able to accomplish this task with a batch process. Well actually you could but it could be more work and more of a chore that just doing it by hand.

My suggestion to you would be to use a scanner with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and scan it into M$ Word, that way you can just scan into the same word file and the overall file size will be much smaller than a ton of .jpeg's or what have you.

Hope this helps!

http://www.spyderix-designz.com

 

[may1hem]

Thanks for the suggestion, but this page won't OCR well, and the last book I tried to OCR was just too unreadable (especially when it comes to technical books).

Does anyone know of a fast image viewer which will display 2 pages side by side, so that I can just dump all the scanned images sequentially numbered into a folder and the image viewer will display 2 at a time, so that it pretty much looks like 2 pages of a book at a time?

I know, i know, i want it all! But if you don't ask, you don't get.

By the way, I found that Photoshop Elements, which came with my digital camera, does a good stitching job on images, so if I had all the time in the world I would use that, but this book that I scanned in has 400 pages, and I'm not prepared to manually perform 200 stitches.

You know, I can't see why it's such a tall order to batch stitch book pages, as I'm not expecting any intelligent overlapping (like with panoramas). Any crappy join would be sufficient as long as the pages display left+right like the book.

Any advice or links would be greatly appreciated!

Thx,
May

 

[SPYDERIX]

Hi,

The only semi-fast way to do this (which isn't that fast) would be to make 200 folders and put page 1 and page 2 in one, then 3 and 4 in another, etc etc etc, then go into photoshop and create an action to open and stitch the images together and save it, then run that as a batch process to all 200 folders.

It would be a bit faster that doing it by hand, but making 200 folders and putting 2 pages into each one will take a while.

The problem with actions and batch processing right now is that you can't program within the program. Meaning you can't specify to do an action to every odd numberd file or to loop a single action within multiple layers etc, so for you to do this, it's not going to be that easy, but it can be done.

Hope this helps!

http://www.spyderix-designz.com

 

[sdraper]

What about some sort of html based solution. I am not an html wizard but I would bet you could find some sort of image browsing html template for free on the web and maybe adapt it for viewing two images at a time. Just a thought.
hope this helps,
Sam Draper

 

[may1hem]

Thanks for the idea Sam!!

I don't think that Javascript has access to the filesystem, so I might have to resort to using Visual Basic.

It be possible to view odd+even pages based on incremental filename, and view it full screen.

Whether or not it works, a *STAR* for the brainwave!

May