Import Scan

[Elmerweb]

As a long term user of Serif  Plus programs , the Affinity series of programs lack a facility to import from scanner on Windows. The scan import is of major importance together with the additional control of scans made available by the program over and above built in or generic scanner software.

The Affinity group of programs doesn't replace the earlier Plus series for users in my category

I am concerned that I will be in difficulty when the plus series stops working.

[Cumbrian]

Yes this is a major miss,i scan lots of old photos,so I will be sticking to photoshop for the time being.

Edited July 1, 2019 by Cumbrian

[ashf]

It's little complicated.
Serif says they support only TWAIN, but they won't implement it on Windows because 64bit TWAIN driver is poor.
That may be true since 64bit Photoshop also doesn't support TWAIN.
But Photoshop on Windows supports WIA.
Then Serif says they won't support WIA since it's not common.
But as far as I know most of consumer scanners and all-in-one printers supports WIA.

 

[John Rostron]

I use VueScan or SilverFast for scanning. When I save the scanned image as tiff or jpg, it will automatically open in Affinity Photo. I have AP as the default program for opening these file-types. Not quite as efficient as scanning from AP, but it is still very convenient.

John

[Mick West]

I agree it is very irratating not being able to import directly from my scanner as I used to with page plus. Let us hope that they will include this feature in their nex upgrade

[borkia]

I still hope, that Affinity Photo Will implement WIA support... It is quite strange to use "All-in-one designer suit" for all kinds of design work but switch to another to scan images. 

Is it in feature requests?

[Fritz_H]

Hi all,

I also noticed this missing feature just a few days ago.

Since the MacOS-Version does offer import from a Scanner, I guess my allegation (?) seems to be true:

• Serif is either still very "Apple first"-minded  and not really interested in Windows-Customers
  and/or
• does not have enough manpower to provide full service to the Windows-platform. 

I also have not yet read about hardware-accelerated features in Photo although even some
freeware applications do offer e.g. Video-encoding with CUDA/OpenCL;
not to mention commercial Software:  https://create.pro/blog/opencl-vs-cuda/

Since Serif implemented "Metal-Compute" on the MacOS-Platform...

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E15qY6rh0Hg

....I guess its justified to ask: When will Windows-Users see similar features?

As far as I can say, we paid the same price for the Software as those Customers with the "other" System.


Any useful answer from Serif would be very welcome...

kind regards
Fritz

[walt.farrell]

18 minutes ago, Fritz_H said:

Any useful answer from Serif would be very welcome...

If you search the forums you will find that:

• Serif has said that the lack of scanner support on Windows is due to the lack of 64-bit driver support by Windows itself.
• Serif has said they are working on additional GPU support for Windows. It came first on Mac because Mac provides a more cohesive environment and services that made it easier to do, there.

They have said this often enough that I doubt we'll hear anything new from them, except for the GPU support, where at some point we should hear that it's available in a beta. Until then we probably won't hear anything.

[Fritz_H]

7 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

• Serif has said that the lack of scanner support on Windows is due to the lack of 64-bit driver support by Windows itself.
• Serif has said they are working on additional GPU support for Windows. It came first on Mac because Mac provides a more cohesive environment and services that made it easier to do, there.

Perhaps TWAIN is dead, but what about WIA?
https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/windows/win32/wia/-wia-startpage

WIA is not supported by the .NET-Framework.
Perhaps the Windows-Versions are just ".NET"-Stuff??

List of Applications with WIA-Support:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Image_Acquisition#Applications_that_use_WIA

Hardware accelerated processing:
please check this list of CUDA-accelerated commercial applications from NVidia: 
https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/Data-Center/tesla-product-literature/gpu-applications-catalog.pdf

This is not "early adopter - technology" any more.
I am not a developer, I do not claim this to be easy, but it should urgently be in their roadmap.

kind regards and a happy great new year to all here!
Fritz

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, Fritz_H said:

Perhaps TWAIN is dead, but what about WIA?
https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/windows/win32/wia/-wia-startpage

The first question then is, how many scanners ship WIA-compliant drivers?

The next is, is scanning directly into Photo really important enough to prioritize it ahead of other functions that may be wanted by more users, especially since (a) most users probably don't have scanners and (b) there is other software those users with scanners can use to do the scan, and then import that into Photo.

9 minutes ago, Fritz_H said:

Hardware accelerated processing:
please check this list of CUDA-accelerated commercial applications from NVidia: 
https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/Data-Center/tesla-product-literature/gpu-applications-catalog.pdf

This is not "early adopter - technology" any more.
I am not a developer, I do not claim this to be easy, but it should urgently be in their roadmap.

As I said (and they have said), they are working on more GPU usage for Windows.

But considering what you've shown there, would Serif really want to limit their support to NVidia? Probably not, and that's part of the issue on Windows that they didn't have on Mac. More graphics cards, and from different manufacturers, and more potential application layers or interfaces to support.

If it were easy we'd have it already.

[Fritz_H]

WIA:
Did you see that the list of WIA-applications also shows "Serif PhotoPlus" ?
= the knowledge how to implement this is already available at Serif...

CUDA:
This was just an example because I remembered this name easier than the name of the AMD/ATI-technology ("OpenCL").
In the end I don´t care about the name: just use all the computing-power available.

kind regards
Fritz