Twainable

Even though it is not as popular as Photoshop, paint.net is a noteworthy alternative that packs several powerful features that enable you to edit or generate stunning designs free of charge.

In fact, the tool comes with a plethora of tools and options to help you enhance any artistic projects, including but not limited to posterize, inverting, distort, emboss, fractals, so on and so forth. Similarly to Adobe's graphic editor, paint.net supports various plugins that can make your work easier.

Twainable is such an extension specially designed to help you acquire images directly from older TWAIN compatible scanners.

Consequentially, in order to use it, you need to make sure that your scanner supports TWAIN and you have the necessary drivers installed. Since it is a plugin, it does not require a setup, but rather you can decompress the archive and copy the DLL files included in the Effects folder of paint.net.

Once the EZTW32.DLL and Twainable.DLL are in the aforementioned folder, it is recommended that you start or restart the application so that you can preview the extension under the menu Effect, Tools and Acquire from TWAIN.

Lastly, it is worth mentioning that Twainable allows you to choose the TWAIN-source to use or acquire to the clipboard, the latter option having the role of starting the scanner software and storing the image in the clipboard.