Hello,

I'm interested in driving SANE to scan twice in succession (one with the lamp 
on, one with the lamp off), so I can scan against a lightbox (with its lamp 
off, and on, respectively) to manufacture an alpha layer for my scanned image.

(I’m scanning postcards; some have unusually shaped edges, and with examples of 
every colour touching the edge of the card — my attempts at automating masking 
with alpha mattes work only some of the time)

I have a Pixma scanner (CanoScan LiDE 400), for which SANE doesn't declare any 
lamp-related options (with scanimage -A). I’m a software & firmware engineer, 
so I’m comfortable getting into the detail, but I wanted to learn from the 
community first:

- I’ve skimmed through the pixma backend code; it looks as though the lamp 
status is only ever read (and never written). Is anyone aware of a way to set 
the lamp status (even if currently unimplemented in SANE today) — ie. would the 
hardware permit this?

- Is there any experience in the SANE dev community around this kind of RGBA 
style scanning? Are there other recommended approaches? (beyond alpha mattes)

Many thanks,
JP

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