The Clockwork Mansion

Underground Warehouse => Treasury => Tower of Technomancy => Topic started by: WhiteFox on April 27, 2012, 04:34:10 PM

Title: Can't find a driver, dangit.
Post by: WhiteFox on April 27, 2012, 04:34:10 PM
I have a CanoScan LiDE 200 scanner, and Photoshop CS4. I have a driver for the scanner for Photoshop CS2, but not CS4. Since Adobe is annoying and doesn't like to let me run CS2 and CS4 at the same time, I have to close CS4, launch CS2, scan/save artwork, close CS2, and launch CS4 again. This is particularly annoying and laborious when I'm in the middle of working on something in CS4. The Canon website basically sez "talk to Adobe for drivers," and CS4, being out of date, isn't really supported anymore.

I have a standalone application for the scanner that I can run at the same time as CS4, but it has limited options for settings and only saves as .png, .jpg, etc, so the image quality suffers. It's also dumb and annoying.

If anyone could help me out here, it would be so very greatly appreciated.

I'm operating on MacOS 10.6.8, by the way.
Title: Re: Can't find a driver, dangit.
Post by: Qilby on April 27, 2012, 04:40:21 PM
I'm not much of a Mac guy, but I assume it will follow the same steps as anything else when you install a device. The website for the drivers that I found is here: http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/support/consumer/scanners/canoscan_series/canoscan_lide200?selectedName=DriversAndSoftware

The driver, version 14.11.4 reads simply: "This product is a TWAIN-compliant scanner driver for Canon color image scanner." - So what about your current driver works in CS2 but not CS4? Very odd, especially given the generic nature of this driver here. My feeling is that you just need to point to this driver in CS4 when installing your product and it should do the rest for you. That's how it works with Windows environments, anyways, and I'm hoping the Mac OS was built to make things like this as painless as possible.

Of course, if CS4 itself simply took a list of scanners and decided which ones to support and which ones to label deprecated, you're probably out of luck. There may be a user-made driver out there to get around any sort of program-level incompatibility, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Here's hoping it works.
Title: Re: Can't find a driver, dangit.
Post by: WhiteFox on April 27, 2012, 08:20:56 PM
Quote from: Qilby on April 27, 2012, 04:40:21 PM
The driver, version 14.11.4 reads simply: "This product is a TWAIN-compliant scanner driver for Canon color image scanner." - So what about your current driver works in CS2 but not CS4? Very odd, especially given the generic nature of this driver here.

Well, the driver for CS2...

Uh...

Oh, okay. Yeah. I see what's going on now. The driver for CS2 is it's own plugin. No such thing exists for CS4. There is, however, a TWAIN plugin for CS4. Which some brilliant fellow at Adobe decided was optional, so it wasn't included with the PS-CS4 install. So, basically, I've been looking for the wrong plugin all this time.

Epilogue: found, downloaded, and installed the CS4 TWAIN plugin, everything working fine. Thanks for the help, much appreciated.
Title: Re: Can't find a driver, dangit.
Post by: Qilby on April 27, 2012, 08:54:28 PM
Glad I could help. Too bad there isn't a supported applet for it. I know plenty of people who refuse to upgrade software, be it OS or otherwise, simply because the latest version is a step or two back from the satisfactory level they were already at. Winzip used to fit on a floppy disk, and Photoshop 7 actually wasn't a resource hog.