Image enhancement

Scanix Desktop can clean up a page image — straighten it, crop it, sharpen it, drop a form colour, convert it to black & white — so that what you keep (and what OCR reads) looks its best. You do this in two places, and which one you reach for depends on whether you want the cleanup baked into every page of a job automatically, or applied interactively to the page in front of you.

Two places enhancements live

Think of enhancement as having a "set it and forget it" lane and a "hands-on" lane.

The two lanes share the same underlying cleanups — they differ in when and to what they apply.

The template Scan & Image tab (every page, automatic)

When you build a template, its Scan & Image tab is where you pre-decide the enhancements that should run on every page processed with that template. This is the lights-out path for a digitisation job: configure it once, and Scanix applies it automatically at capture/import time. The controls are grouped into cards — Capture Settings (resolution, colour mode, paper source, duplex), Auto-Corrections, Image Enhancement, Form Processing, and Scanner Features — and most are off by default, so you opt into exactly what your documents need.

Because these run on every page unattended, they are the right home for cleanups you'd otherwise repeat hundreds of times: auto-deskew, crop, denoise, line removal, colour dropout, and so on. The capture and enhancement controls themselves are covered in Scan settings.

The Viewer Enhance panel (this page, interactive)

When a document is already open, the Viewer gives you a hands-on workspace. Click Enhance in the top toolbar (the magic-wand button, tooltip "Image enhancements") — or open the right sidebar and pick the Enhance tab — and the Enhancements panel appears. Every control updates a live preview immediately; nothing is saved until you press the apply button at the bottom.

This is the lane for fixing a page that didn't come out right, or for tuning a one-off before export. The panel groups its controls into collapsible sections — Transform, Auto-Corrections, Image Enhancement, Morphology, Structural Cleanup, Adjustments, Color Mode, and Color Dropout — and each one earns its place. The full list of sliders and toggles is in the Enhancement adjustments reference.

To compare before and after, use the eye / eye-off button in the panel header (tooltip "Show original" / "Show enhanced"). If your template already applies its own enhancements, a separate toolbar toggle, Show raw / Show enhanced, appears as well — it switches the canvas between the template-enhanced image and the raw scan, which is a different comparison from the panel's own eye button.

Geometry vs pixel: why it matters

Enhancements split into two families, and the difference explains a couple of Scanix's design choices.

• Geometry operations change the page's size or angle: deskew (straighten a tilted page), auto-rotate, and the crops (Auto-crop trims borders conservatively; Crop white background trims aggressively to the content block). These run once and early, before anything else.
• Pixel operations recolour pixels without changing the page size: binarize, denoise, sharpen, despeckle, contrast, brightness, colour mode, colour dropout, line and hole removal, and the rest.

The reason geometry runs first and separately is alignment. Cropping or rotating shifts every pixel coordinate on the page, so if it ran after you'd drawn capture zones, those zones would land in the wrong place. Scanix runs geometry up front and tracks the crop offset, so your zones and the recognised text stay matched to the image.

Apply vs Apply & Re-OCR

In the Viewer, the apply button at the bottom of the panel only appears once you've changed at least one control, and its label adapts to the page's state:

• Apply — shown when the target page hasn't been read yet. It bakes the enhancement into the page. Any recognition that was cached for that page is dropped, so the page reads as un-recognised until you run OCR.
• Apply & Re-OCR — shown when the target page already has recognised text. It bakes the enhancement and immediately re-reads the page, so the text layer stays in sync with the new image.

The split exists so that changing the picture never silently leaves you with text that describes the old picture. While it works, the button is replaced by a status banner — "Enhancing & re-running OCR…" or "Enhancing pages…" — and afterward you get a confirmation toast.

If more than one page is selected in the thumbnail strip, the enhancement applies to all selected pages plus the current one; otherwise it applies just to the page on screen. When deciding whether you'll see Apply or Apply & Re-OCR, it's the OCR state of those target pages that matters. To read pages in the first place, see Run OCR.

Which lane should I use?

Next steps

Related

• Enhancement adjustments
• Scan settings
• Run OCR