Scanning, editing, etc, on Mac; asking for advice

[stringlibrary]

I know this has been addressed before here (in 2008!), but wondering if there's any updated suggestions for software to use, settings, work flow, etc. for Mac OS X (Mountain Lion, latest OS).

In the past, I have used Paperport (then by Scansoft, lately Nuance) in Win (not available for Mac lately), with a Mustek A3 1200 scanner. I now have a Brother MFC-6490CW (11"x17" flatbed scanning area, or 8"x11" for document feeder). The Mustek A3 1200 was a disaster to use because of outdated/temperamental drivers - despite its redeeming merits of large scanning surface and low price.

The (main) goal is to scan old string materials (violin, viola, cello) from the late 1700s to the early 1920s that have 9"x12" or even larger page sizes with varying degree of yellowing and some marginalia. Please suggest best resolution for this kind of materials, from your experience.

Now, I'm looking for a proven, reliable software solution to achieve the following on Mac:
- scan multiple pages (300dpi?, B/W, grayscale, etc.?)
- deskew
- removing marginalia, etc. (VERY important)
- adding watermark (optional)
- adding introduction/preface/content links/page numbers
- batch processing
- smart work flow
- intuitive user interface
- expected future support of the software for Mac platform (future-proof, as much as reasonable)

Thank you!

[cheap imitation]

I'd like to add to this with another, more specific question.

OS X 10.7.5 here. I have a folder of 36 TIFF images, compressed appropriately (CCITT G4) with GIMP—I didn't scan them myself (not having a scanner) or clean them up (not knowing how), merely converted them to monochrome. These images are 100-200KB on average; the whole folder totals 4.7MB. Whenever I try to compile these images into a single PDF file using Preview or any other built-in OS X software the resulting file size is something like 14MB and at much lower quality to boot. I'm going to try converting them using Inkscape and merging them using PDFSaM in a bit. (if nothing else works, i'll save them to an external drive, reboot in Windows and follow the image conversion guidelines.)

The question I have is: what is Apple doing wrong? Why does a fairly small TIFF image (e.g. page 2, 93 KB) turn into a significantly larger PDF image (in this case 321 KB) with dimensions that are actually smaller (the TIFFs are 300 DPI)? Are they being compressed incorrectly, or... what? I don't think it's just Preview either, a 36 page Sibelius file for instance exports to ~1MB in PDF where the original file is usually closer to 300KB (without versions) but I think I always assumed that was because of the resolution...

[cheap imitation]

As an update to my previous post (which has not yet appeared), I did wind up having to move over to Windows to convert the TIFs into a reasonably sized PDF file (which proved to be even smaller than the original images, actually). If you are scanning/editing a lot on mac and don't have Boot Camp or Acrobat Pro it may be worth trying to get some of the programs listed in the scanning guides (PDFill, IrfanView, etc) to work under an emulator (WINE, etc).

[cheap imitation]

I have DL'ed ImageMagick which is supposed to be good for image conversion and, if I can get it to work, will save me the reboot-in-Windows step. But (not being a particularly computer-literate individual, I'm afraid) I can't seem to do anything with it—I seem to be missing some "delegates" (which are, apparently, additional bits of software that are used to read various file formats) and therefore am completely failing at image conversion, but I've no idea where to find these delegates, and how to install them. Anyone have more experience with this software and can offer advice?

[cypressdome]

I'm afraid that I have no experience with the Mac OS but it appears that the Imagemagick team suggests using MacPorts to automatically download and install Imagemagick and the delegate libraries. Did you use this method?

[cheap imitation]

I tried that, as well as the method of downloading and "manually" installing the tarball, but neither one was successful. On closer inspection it does say the package is for Mountain Lion however, I'm still using Lion so perhaps that's the problem. I'll probably make further enquiries on Imagemagick's own boards &/or IRC channels.