Scan Thing is a very practical scanning app for iOS and iPadOS. Take a picture of an object and it will be automatically cropped and detached from the background! We will tell you how to work with it in this article.
Sometimes you run into those apps that you think are ‘brilliant’! Scan Thing is one of them. If you regularly take pictures of objects that you have to remove the background from, you know that this is a job that just takes time. Certainly, Photoshop has a feature to quickly realize this nowadays, but by no means everyone has money (to spare) for this package. And to buy it only for quick cuts if you are otherwise happy with the Photo editor that you have?
Also read: Photoshop for iPad – Cut and Adjust Objects
The Scan Thing app does the same for you, but for a one-time fee of a few euros. Place an object on the table – preferably well lit – and take a photo. The magic starts right away: you see your cut-out object floating. When you’re happy with the crop, tap Save, after which the image is placed transparently on the camera roll. From there, you can access it with any photo editing app you want.
The automatic cropping works – experience has shown – very well. In fact, if you ensure that the object to be cut out is as separate as possible from surrounding matters, it almost never goes wrong. Only if the background color and the color (or part of the colors) of the object are very similar, it is sometimes necessary to pay attention.
From existing photos
Scan Thing can also extract objects from photos already taken and thus present on the camera roll. To do this, tap the fourth button seen from above in the live main panel of the app. Select a photo and tap add†In the preview, drag a selection with your finger around the object to be cropped. Satisfied? Tap the check mark and then Saveâ€
With the latter functionality – or cutting out objects from camera roll photos – you actually get the aforementioned Photoshop functionality. What is striking about the technology is that it works very quickly.
Scan documents
Scan Thing can do even more. It is also a document scanner that neatly straightens photographed pages automatically. To do this, tap the top button, after which you default to automatic scan mode. That works nice and fast: place a page in the picture, after which the app automatically recognizes, selects, photographs and straightens it.
Is that all just a little too fast for you, you can also choose the option Manual tap; in that case you have to tap the shutter button yourself. For the rest, in principle, everything will continue to work fully automatically, but it is possible to fine-tune the automatically selected cropping and perspective correction if desired.
The magic of Scan Thing is not over yet. After scanning one or more pages, tap Save, then OCR is unleashed on the document. Tap the share button and transfer the whole thing as a PDF to your favorite PDF viewer.
The original ‘scan photo’ is preserved, but you can now select the text in it. Ideal if you later want to use quotes from, for example, a (library) book in a paper or report: select, copy and paste.
Keep text only
If you really only need the text of a page, that’s no problem for Scan Thing either. To do this, tap the top button with the dashes in the main panel. To start the OCR procedure, tap the button Textâ€
You have to be a little careful here, because Scan Thing doesn’t read Dutch (yet?). You can select the desired language at the top by tapping the language button (English by default). You can then select one of the available languages.
If you then tap the Text button, OCR is immediately performed on the text on the screen; with a tap copy transfer the text to your device’s clipboard. From there you can paste into any app that can handle text, such as your word processor.
Settings
To adjust the operation of Scan Thing to your liking, a settings button is available at the top right. Looks like a block with sliders. Tap it and the settings menu will open. You can select the start mode (Default Scanning Mode) and the default text recognition language.
If you want it, you can turn the switch Crop Transparent Pixels below Image Export Settings to turn on. There is a warning here that you may lose extra scanning time as a result, but in practice we don’t really notice it. An older iPhone or iPad may indeed have more trouble with it, so it’s a matter of trying it out.
PDF quality
Be sure to take a look below PDF Export Settings, here you will find a slider to adjust the quality of a scanned document to your liking. A higher resolution leads to larger files. However, you should bear in mind that the scan resolution is significantly lower compared to that of a flatbed scanner. So it is better to choose a higher storage resolution, so that you can print the PDFs later with good decency.
Last but not least: Scan Things is not only available for iOS and iPadOS, but also for MacOS. Although the camera of the average iPad or iPhone is significantly better than the average webcam of a Mac. And the flexibility of a separately hand-held device is also a lot more convenient, of course.
Anyway, in our opinion one of those ‘must have’ apps for your mobile!
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