Prizmo is a straightforward, powerful, and versatile scanner for Mac. Its Optical Character Recognition (OCR) features allow the app to convert photographs or scans of text into readable, usable text files with just a click.
Prizmo for Mac Review A Post By: Barrie Smith. This review is all about using a digital camera for a purpose it was never intended for. Since taking on a new Mac with Snow Leopard operating system I sadly found that my marvellous image/text scanner does not work due to a lack of a suitable driver.
Equally compatible with scanned pages, images from the web, or even photos taken on your Apple devices, Prizmo OCR Mac scanner is the simplest way to convert physical text, old posters, and anything else that strikes your fancy into high-quality, searchable PDFs. Fluent in 23 languages and capable of processing multiple pages at once, Prizmo is ready for any book, magazine, poster, or brochure you throw at it.
- Puzzling Prizmo I was slightly puzzled when I launched Prizmo because it required me either to open an existing Prizmo document from iCloud or my Mac, but of course I didn't have any Prizmo.
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- Prizmo Go lets you quickly grab text with the camera. After text is recognized in a blink of an eye, you can interact with it in many useful ways. Or just send it to other apps. And if you've got a Mac, you can even copy/paste it there (.). No more retyping.
This compact Mac scanning app comes packed with tools to help make your life easier. Whether you need to bump up the resolution on an image, eliminate the distortion of a bent page, or correct for perspective, the app has you covered. Its text-to-speech feature can even read to you.
Extract text from an image with Prizmo app
Save yourself the sweat and leave it to the professional scanner app for Mac that allows you to copy text from any picture. Here’s how to get the most out of it.
As an OCR scanner app, Prizmo can edit and perform OCR on images from a variety of sources, including scanners, cameras, and your hard drive.
Import images
To bring an image into Prizmo:
- Click the + icon and select your source from the drop-down menu.
- Highlight the image or images you’d like to work with and click “add” — they’ll appear in order along the left-hand side of the app window.
- If the language isn’t automatically detected, click the globe icon to select it.
Or, there's an even easier way if you have your documents at hand: import them directly through iPhone's camera.
To do this, select Shoot with iPhone from the sources on the main import menu. You'll see your iPhone's name after, simply select it and close the window. Now, any image you make with a phone will be directly imported to Prizmo and you'll see it immediately.
Prepare your image for text recognizing
The app’s toolbar gives you a range of options for preparing your image for OCR.
- Click the Crop button
- Select Frame and highlight the grid icon to adjust the corners of your image and eliminate any distortion to the text from perspective. A more complex version of this technique, under the Curvature tab, can even correct for bent pages.
- The sliders under the Adjust button help make the text more readable by increasing sharpness and contrast.
Conversion and touchups
Want to copy text from an image or convert scanned PDF to instantly editable text? Prizmo makes character recognition smarter, faster, and better. When your image is ready for primetime
- Click Recognize to start the OCR process.
- When the process is finished, you can review the extracted text on the right-hand side of the screen and correct any formatting errors or misrecognized characters.
The recognized text can be translated, read using Text-to-speech technology, or shared.
Click the Speech button to hear the text read aloud or convert it to another language with the Translate menu.
Share recognized text and images
With Prizmo app you can share text with just a couple of taps:
- Click the share button to distribute your document. You can use the drop-down menu to choose between file types that use the plain text you extracted, a PDF of the original, or a searchable PDF that combines both.
- When you’ve chosen your file type, pick your export method of choice from the dropdown menu or click Export to File to save it to your Mac.
There’s nothing more frustrating than a PDF you can’t search. But with Prizmo via Setapp, those days are long gone. It’s time to digitize and
Prizmo For Mac Pro
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This review is all about using a digital camera for a purpose it was never intended for.
Since taking on a new Mac with Snow Leopard operating system I sadly found that my marvellous image/text scanner does not work due to a lack of a suitable driver.
Now, since taking on Prizmo for Mac I can scan documents as well as perform OCR to file away the editable texts.
Then I found other but possibly less useful functions tucked away in Prizmo: curvature and perspective correction.
Let’s start with the OCR function. I made three handheld shots with my trusty Sony compact digicam, saved as JPEGs: one of a photocopied magazine article; a page from an early book of comic poetry; and finally, a page of tightly packed from a book of mine on collectable cameras.
The photocopy image was imported into Prizmo. First task was to locate the grid corners, the area in which the desired text was located; so I tapped the button Full Grid … this can square up an image that may be off level.
At this point I tapped the OCR button; by moving the cursor across the page I could preview the recognised text; following this I saved the OCR scan and could do this as a PDF file or as rich text or regular text.
If you’re running the demo version you can assess Prizmo’s capabilities in OCR and view its ability to recognise text — but the demo does not let you save it. Natch!
The result was that I had a text file that was 99 per cent perfect, falling down only where there were line breaks. Spelling? 100 per cent correct!
Prizmo Mac Os
You may need to work with pages that are less than white in colour or ones that have text in colour. The app’s controls allow you to correct brightness and contrast in the document image or even to reduce its bit depth.
Now to the books
The comic poetry book image showed some curvature from the book not being photographed completely flat. No probs! Any bends were corrected in Prizmo.
The other book page was a bit more challenging but, by squaring it up and adjusting brightness I managed to make an OCR scan that gave me 99 per cent correct, readable text.
Curves etc
The app is handy for squaring up images but frankly is little better than Photoshop’s tools. But if you ain’t got Photoshop….
Comment
I found that correcting the squareness was the main element in achieving successful OCR.
The app is a little erratic in its behaviour: sometimes an image would load upside down and then, on occasions, the preview would appear upside down or sideways on the preview screen.
To assess its OCR talents I ran the text images through a dedicated OCR Program — ABBYY FineReader 5 Sprint Plus — and found that on most images Prizmo performed better. Nuff said!
Prizmo For Mac Free
System: PowerPC or Intel Mac with OSX 10.5.8 Leopard or later.
Get it at www.creaceed.com/prizmo/
Get it at www.creaceed.com/prizmo/