I recently had a question about what kind of scanner I was using to make very large one page files of locomotive and air brake diagrams.

Actually I use a very ordinary 8.5x11 scanner, scan the diagrams in many sections, and use the Photomerge function of Adobe Photoshop to assemble the scans into one image. The menu selection sequence is usually FILE - AUTOMATE - PHOTOMERGE.

There are videos on YouTube that give good explanations.

PC

What file formats does this work for?

Almost any digital image format you can think of. There are very few image formats Photoshop can't open and work with. It will even convert PDF's to images.

Also note that it works with photos as well too of course. There are various options like "cylindrical" "spherical" "collage" etc. So for example if you "scan" a structure by walking along it at a uniform distance and taking images at interval, this can create a nice pano of it.

Something that helps getting consistent exposures with the scanner is to scan the first full scanner flatbed size section, then scan the rest of the parts without previewing. If you preview, the auto exposure will change with variations in the scanned section.

I recommend trying the REPOSITION option first when doing a photomerge of flat scans, it usually ends up working best.

PC